Left: Francisco de Zurbarán, Saint Francis of Assisi mummified standing, around 1640 Lyon, Museum of Fine Arts. Image Right: Éric Poitevin, Untitled, 2021 © Lyon MBA – Photo Alain Basset – © ADAGP, Paris, 2022
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The Musée des Beaux-Arts is giving carte blanche for the first time to a photographer: Éric Poitevin, a major figure in contemporary French photography.
Exhibited in particular at the Frac Auvergne and the Villa Medici in Rome, Éric Poitevin’s work is marked by several photographic series of veterans (1985), nuns (1990), killed deer (1993) or Bois (1995) who demonstrate an equal interest in humans, animals and nature.
Developing a work that reconsiders the genres of classical painting (nude, portrait, still life, landscape, vanity), he leads a photographic reflection around nature and the body.
With this exhibition, he offers a new look at the works of little-known artists from the museum’s collection (Lucas Cranach, Francisco de Zurbarán, Frans Snyders or Odilon Redon…), putting them in resonance with his own photos.
The journey begins in what could be his studio, posing his approach to photography from the outset: camera shooting and veil of sight, playing with the process of revelation, appearance and disappearance.
His huge black and white photos play on the overexposed or underexposed image, revealing a floating body that asserts itself or withdraws.
The black and white photos of this aiming veil (fabric that he places like a work on a pedestal once it has been brought into focus) echo the anonymous sculpture, Crying (second half of the 15th century), of a woman covered with a veil, who cries and expresses a suffering that one perceives while she is hidden.
Further on, we discover contemporary portraits of naked women, young or old, which he reveals as noble as this woman in the Portrait of a noble Saxon lady (1534) by Lucas Cranach whose tight and constrained body is dressed in Sunday best.
In the room where the Saint Francis of Assisi mummified standing (1640) by Francisco de Zurbarán, he works around the myth of Saint Francis of Assisi, in levitation, with his gaze towards the sky. His huge black and white photos play on the overexposed or underexposed image, revealing a floating body that asserts itself or withdraws.
An impressive journey
The journey continues with almost immersive landscapes, revisited still lifes, culminating in his view of animal painting.
So echoing dead birds (1801) by Jean-Pierre-Xavier Bidauld, it presents a rain of suspended birds, found or dead objects that we refuse to see and whose splendor it reveals as if they were alive.
Other photographs resonate with hunting paintings like boar hunt (1720-1725) by Alexandre-François Desportes which leads him to magnify, like a sculpture, the head of a boar, also giving us to see the photo of a dead deer lying in an incredibly human pose…
Impressive at times, the work of Éric Poitevin poses, through the prism of photography, a new look at the history of art and what connects it to the living. The artist is also present in the exhibition Une histoire de famille. Collection(s) Robelin at macLYON until July 10, 2022.
Eric Poitevin. Guest – Until August 28 at Museum of Fine Arts, Lyon 1st
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