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Landscape Faces
We are usually the ones who watch the actors, hidden away, as if lurking, in the darkness of a cinema or theatre. Jérôme De Perlinghi’s portraits have this initial effect of bouncing our gaze “back to the sender”, as it were. What are they telling us?
A refusal to engage? A desire for revenge? The suggested possibility that they may also examine us beyond the falsely objective lens that stares at them?
Their often ice-cold eyes could turn us into stone. But Jérôme De Perlinghi’s art and talent consists in giving them warmth: under his eye, these gazes prove burning, if not scorching.
There are those who, inevitably, we know and recognise,
the stars of the international firmament, from Kirk Douglas and Claudia Cardinale to Harrison Ford and Bulle Ogier. The less or not at all recognisable, the circle sometimes expanding to include writers, musicians or film-makers (producers, technicians) whose vocation and job rarely involves them being on show
or being seen at all. Those also who have aged or disappeared, as Jérôme De Perlinghi started his work in the last century (circa the mid-90s). It is one of the laws of photographic portraiture that a portrait will eventually become an archive that, like cinema, records the life of the dead.
How does Jérôme manage that? I remember him at the Deauville American film festival. He had set up his pop-up photo studio in a corridor on the ground floor in Hôtel Normandie where the festival organisers would kindly send the stars to him. Jérôme worked in a corner—his corner, which is very telling of his discretion and subtlety. And more than warm, he was truly happy and all smiles as a Nick Cave or an Anouk Aimée would appear. “This is joyful!” is one of Jérôme’s favourite expressions.
Throughout his gallery, connections are made through several choices. First, the choice of black and white enables all shades, from ultra-white to extreme black, and not least increases the fictional, and therefore imaginary and dream-like, aspect since it is pretty well-known that humans usually tend to see in colours. And so we find ourselves imagining—a way of turning celebrities into unknown characters—that this handsome face is definitely not that of Burt Reynolds, but that of a truck driver who would have given us a ride on some American highway. Or that this sweet face does not belong to Carole Bouquet but to a Sicilian madonna.
So this decision to use black and white is an artistic gesture akin to that of an etching engraver. Between the lines, from light to dark, we glimpse a paradoxically more arresting and striking realism than reality.
Then, there is the equally systematic choice of a close—if not tight—framing. Yet, this is not about caging the subjects,
to the point of objectifying them, but to come closer, on tiptoe, to explore and possibly understand those whom Jean Cocteau first called “Sacred Monsters”.
Last, and not least, there is the necessary and accepted imperative not to smile, grin or make a face, like in the last photo booths. And also not to look away with a somewhat enigmatic detachment, but bluntly, as it were, straight into Jérôme’s eyes. Generally speaking, there is no kidding in front of his camera. But this gravitas is literally extraordinary. It focuses the whole body, evades the temptation to psychologise the posture,
but above all it transforms the faces into landscapes—just like the French language is gifted enough to make face (visage) and landscape (paysage) rhyme. Even when still, the face is an animated surface: features, wrinkles, bumps, hollows, length, width, gap of the barely open mouth, scar of closed lips, sockets of eyes which, in Jérôme’s monochrome portraits,
are all black. Following the same slightly off-beat descriptive momentum, one could argue that these wrinkles running across the cheek are furrows resulting from hard work, that these reliefs on the brow are the valleys and these eyes an abyss.
From the face to the landscape, we are on a hike, initially through fog even though, as the photographic technical term goes, the portraits are in sharp focus. And suddenly, as if in
a beautiful clearing moment, the landscape face brightens up with all its details to the point of transfiguring so-called flaws (nose askew, ears sticking out) into radiant singularities that overpower all established beauty canons. Even women —especially women—who, through their make-up cheats,
are all presented as wonderfully bare.
It took Jérôme De Perlinghi’s gentle light for the opacity of an exposed face to reveal many singular truths and of course many unresolved mysteries. What is really wandering from one portrait to another is a commonality “simply” called humanity, a humanity that Jérôme always practises in his work and shares with us.
Gérard Lefort
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