Concentrique: Blandine Soulage and Laura Bonnefous

28 JUNE - 24 AUGUST 2024
Concentrique, a two-person show by Laura Bonnefous and Blandine Soulage, is a poetic dance of color and movement in a global space. Photographed between France, Japan, and Angola, the images in the show reflect the indelibly urban focus of each photographer, both in the ways that they interpret architecture and the people who define its metaphorical landscape. In the series Déviation, Soulage disrupts our spatial understanding, interacting with the environment in strange and playful ways in order to challenge our view of the mundane and open “a poetic breach in reality.” Bodies mold around architecture, becoming sculptural in their own right. Flirting with abstraction, the portraiture of Bonnefous crafts a sensory narrative which prods at the mythologies of our humanity through our relationship with the environment. The work of each photographer suggests non-linear movement, operating outside of our spheres of normalcy to better understand the center of the human experience.
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  • Blandine Soulage

  • Déviation

    In a world becoming increasingly sedentary, investing space with movement invites to move along the border between banality and artistic space. Initiated in 2019, the Déviation series displays bodies in unexpected postures that deviate from the ordinary to the extra-ordinary. Unpredicted trajectories, misdirections, reversals of perspective disorganize reality, drawing their own poetic routes. These images feature anonymous characters whose faces are never visible, highlighting expression through the shapes of their bodies Their various “body patterns” open up a world of fictions with open-ended interpretations. Created in collaboration with dancers, these images place their movement potential at the service of imaginary narratives. However, the gesture remains non-performative, these anonymous bodies could be those of anyone. Composed around the graphic and chromatic possibilities of minimalist architectures, these images invite negative space as a breath within the frenetic rhythm of the city.

  • Laura Bonnefous
  • Kilamba
    Laura Bonnefous, Embraced the Pink, Kilamba, 2022

    Kilamba

    The series I create always come to me intuitively, born out of places and stories that I feel drawn to or that puzzle me. They are born out of my desire to make this or that space my own, to reveal something new within it, then to bring it towards a kind of metaphorical landscape, towards the poetry one can find in reality. When I discovered the reality of Kilamba, a city in Angola, it was as if I was struck by lightning: I wanted to work there, in a place whose geopolitical history is closely related to the most contemporary issues, all the while being so distinctive and expressive in its architecture, urban design, and use of colors. In between African and Chinese universes, I wanted to explore and renew all these topics through my own aesthetical and pictorial outlook. 

     

    Kilamba can be found south of the Angolan capital Luanda, after driving for more than an hour; it was funded and built by Chinese investment funds around 2008. It creates a kind of fictional space in the middle of the Angolan landscape, with its sculptural architecture, its pastel-hued walls, its neighborhoods with distinctive color schemes, its contrasted and geometric light, its evanescent atmosphere that seems unreal...as many aspects of the city that inspired and puzzled me, to the point of disorientation even. It also created a deep desire in me to go and explore its spaces, to grasp all the complexity that is at play there, be it social or structural. 

     

    Over two years, I conducted what can be called an intuitive archeology of the territory, through studies of colors, lights, and shapes. Then, successively, I set out to meet the people living in Kilamba and take their portraits, to sketch out the relationship between this environment and humans. This is the transcript of a metaphor born out of feelings, a pictorial outlook on a territory through photography, to draw part of the future face of the world we live in.  — Laura Bonnefous

  • Failles
    Laura Bonnefous, In our Hands, Failles, 2019

    Failles

    FAILLES expresses the exploration and introspection of a territory. A poetic journey on the island of Kyushu, a volcanic region that constantly oscillates between radiance and calm.


    Out of this alliance, portraits were born, and the expression of the landscape faced with these characters revealed new forms. Links were then created, the pieces became organic and the territories became personified, transporting us to a sensory narrative. Pictorial and sculptural, these analogies answer each other like spaces of emotions, colors, and shapes, revealing the complexity of our faults, our cracks, our “failles,” whether they come from Man or Earth. The series was made between France and Japan, and is the subject of a book published at the beginning of 2021 by Éditions H2L2.

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  • ABOUT THE ARTISTS

    Born in Grenoble, France in 1980, Blandine Soulage lives and works in Lyon. After attaining a master's degree in International Cultural Management at Sciences Po Lyon, she developed her first career in production with the French Institute, the Lyon Opera, and the Biennale de la Danse. In 2013, Soulage began her artistic career by training in photography at the Gobelins School. Her work explores the architecture of bodies and their relationship to space. Her visual language is characterized by bold color, staging, lighting, styling, and graphic composition. Soulage also integrates alternative printing processes (screen printing, gum arabic, and plate engraving) into her practice to create unique visual objects through the pictorial and chromatic reinterpretation of her photos. Inks, screens, solid areas, and superpositions allow a return to materiality and plastic experimentation.


    Soulage's Déviation series displays bodies in unexpected postures that deviate from the ordinary to the extra-ordinary. Unpredicted trajectories, misdirections, reversals of perspective disorganize reality, drawing their own poetic routes. These images feature anonymous characters whose faces are never visible, their various “body patterns” opening up a world of fictions with open-ended interpretations. Created in camera, in collaboration with dancers, these images place their movement potential at the service of imaginary narratives. Composed around the graphic and chromatic possibilities of minimalist architectures, these images invite negative space as a breath within the frenetic rhythm of the city.

    In 2023, the Déviation series won second prize from the jury of the Les Rencontres d'Arles X Fuji competition. It was presented as an installation in the public space in Lyon (2023), meeting thousands of city dwellers for 3 months, inviting them to "deviate" from their ordinary trajectories. In summer 2024, it will be exhibited atFotoArica Festival, Chile. From September to December 2023, the series was the subject of a public photographic installation in Lyon. In addition to her fine art work, Soulage carries out photographic commissions in the cultural and institutional sectors, as well as for brands and agencies. Her images are regularly published in media such as New York Times, Time Magazine, Le Monde, Les Inrocks, Libération, Télérama. Soulage also teaches as part of the European Bachelor of Photography program at Bloo School Lyon.

    ...

    Through mixed-media images that focus on the spaces she encounters or the ones she recreates, Laura Bonnefous offers a poetic depiction of reality. Her projects navigate between personal endeavors and commissioned work, using both photography and video. Inspired by the relationships humankind entertains with contemporary landscapes, but also captivated by the transformations our society goes through, she studies and deciphers the mythologies of our humanity in order to depict them with sensitivity. From these elements taken from reality, she crafts her own spaces: metaphorical and personal universes.

     

    Both pictorial and sculptural, her work flirts with abstraction, and thus proposes a new archeology of contemporary codes. She developed her mixed-media practice studying at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, at the Otis College of Art and Design of Los Angeles, and at Gobelins, l’École de l’Image, in Paris.

     

    Laura Bonnefous has taken part in exhibitions and residencies across the world. She has held and participated in many exhibitions at institutions such as: 104 in Paris, the Cité Internationale des Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Bangkok, the Onishi Studio in Japan, the Parcours Saint Germain, the Voies Off, the Mois de la Photo, the Festival de la Jeune Photographie Internationale de Niort, the Palais Galliera, the Arezzo festival in Italy, FotoHaus in Arles, the Rencontres Photographiques du 10e in Paris, the Promenades Photographiques de Vendôme, the Festival de Saint Brieuc, Mairie de Paris, and recently at Haute Photographie in Rotterdam in February 2023. In 2024 she will participate in the Xposure International Photography Festival in Sharjah, UAE. Bonnefous was part of the Artpil 30 under 30 Women Photographers in 2015. She has won several prizes, such as the Bourse du Talent, the Prix Picto, and the Eyes on Talents prize. In 2023, she won the LensCulture Critics Choice. In 2021, she published her first monograph of the series Failles with Éditions H2L2; in 2022, her second book Kilamba was published with Louis Vuitton Editions.