After her studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, the École supérieure d'art in Grenoble and St Martin's School of Art and Design in London, the Paris-born photographer Camille Vivier (b.1977) began her career as an assistant at Purple Magazine. Since then she has been working at the intersection between art and fashion photography for magazines such as I-D, Dazed & Confused, Another and Numéro, as well as for companies such as Stella McCartney, Martin Margiela, Cartier, Le Monde d’Hermès and Isabel Marant. But beyond her commissioned work, Camille Vivier also creates very personal photography, arising from her “own initiative”. The photographs presented by Camille Vivier in this exhibition open up a mysterious, nostalgic imagery to the observer that seems to sway between reality and sensually erotic reverie, recalling movies, art and photo montages of the 1920s. Wedged-in female bodies—for which escape seems impossible—wind their way between rocks and stones and evolve along with them into anthropomorphic forms. A naked woman coils herself around the paw of a cement dinosaur, whose monumentality she succumbs to in the truest sense. Human and animal forms and body parts are fused together in almost abstract formations. In other photographs, wax-like, alien body parts or sculptural masks huddle up against female bodies and drive the tense contrast between natural and artificial to the extreme. As points of departure, Camille Vivier deliberately chooses two art-historically and symbolically charged subjects: the female nude and the still life. She brings model and object together, creating a grotesque and fantastical combination that at once vexes, attracts and excites; that poses questions toward the relationship between nature and artifice, between body and object.
Similar to the surrealism of the 1920s that saw the world of things as an almost inexhaustible mirror of human need, artificial objects and curiosities become bound up in an unusual, magical mixture with the human, female form as pure allurement with tactile and erotic stimuli. Camille Vivier generally knows how to use the subtle eroticism of the object and the psychological impact of materials incisively. This is how the female bodies are most often subjected to spatial limitations. Escape is impossible. Whether stuck between rocks, sitting on a high ledge near a cage or photographically limited through the selected cropping-off of a part of the body, they suggest not just the hidden „trapped“ desire, but also the dissolving boundary between the thing and the human body—arranged in such a way to be a poetic, erotic still life.
Numerous art historical, literary and filmic references resound throughout Camille Vivier’s photography and are then combined and transformed both form and content-wise to create a nostalgia-infused dream world. So emerge timeless, enigmatic and seductive images in which eroticism, symbolism, art, dream, abstraction and sensuality coalesce to form a unique aesthetic.
Numerous art historical, literary and filmic references resound throughout Camille Vivier’s photography and are then combined and transformed both form and content-wise to create a nostalgia-infused dream world. So emerge timeless, enigmatic and seductive images in which eroticism, symbolism, art, dream, abstraction and sensuality coalesce to form a unique aesthetic.
