RITUALS,
BLUE,
OF THE SKY
RITUALS,
BLUE,
OF THE SKY
L E N N Y R É B É R É
VERTIGO
"Vertigo" instills in the heart of works or between them a seductive disturbance. Each image becomes a residue of a general fragmented and silent frame. For several years, Lenny Rébéré has built up a vast atlas in the form of a digital database on which thousands of images taken daily from the Internet are listed. If he draws some of his subjects from it, he completes here his selection of personal photographs taken during his holidays. This mixture underlines the porosity between micro-stories and collective memory in the visual writing of history. Landscapes, lascivious bodies, close-up faces or divers then appear like afterimages, concealing a strange familiarity. Unstable indices of the “information cloud” generated by globalization, where everything is a pretext to be processed and then archived, the artist leads each of his images to the threshold of their crystallization [...]. The colored filters that cover the glass plates also set the tone. They give an artificial appearance performances while accentuating their seductive effect. These color gradients, like a whim, pervert the images, veiling them with a twilight atmosphere, between reverie and erotic melancholy.
Thomas Fort - 2021 - "Vertigo" (excerpt)
VERTIGO
"Vertigo" instills in the heart of works or between them a seductive disturbance. Each image becomes a residue of a general fragmented and silent frame. For several years, Lenny Rébéré has built up a vast atlas in the form of a digital database on which thousands of images taken daily from the Internet are listed. If he draws some of his subjects from it, he completes here his selection of personal photographs taken during his holidays. This mixture underlines the porosity between micro-stories and collective memory in the visual writing of history. Landscapes, lascivious bodies, close-up faces or divers then appear like afterimages, concealing a strange familiarity. Unstable indices of the “information cloud” generated by globalization, where everything is a pretext to be processed and then archived, the artist leads each of his images to the threshold of their crystallization [...]. The colored filters that cover the glass plates also set the tone. They give an artificial appearance performances while accentuating their seductive effect. These color gradients, like a whim, pervert the images, veiling them with a twilight atmosphere, between reverie and erotic melancholy.
Thomas Fort - 2021 - "Vertigo" (excerpt)
VERTIGO
"Vertigo" instills in the heart of works or between them a seductive disturbance. Each image becomes a residue of a general fragmented and silent frame. For several years, Lenny Rébéré has built up a vast atlas in the form of a digital database on which thousands of images taken daily from the Internet are listed. If he draws some of his subjects from it, he completes here his selection of personal photographs taken during his holidays. This mixture underlines the porosity between micro-stories and collective memory in the visual writing of history. Landscapes, lascivious bodies, close-up faces or divers then appear like afterimages, concealing a strange familiarity. Unstable indices of the “information cloud” generated by globalization, where everything is a pretext to be processed and then archived, the artist leads each of his images to the threshold of their crystallization [...]. The colored filters that cover the glass plates also set the tone. They give an artificial appearance performances while accentuating their seductive effect. These color gradients, like a whim, pervert the images, veiling them with a twilight atmosphere, between reverie and erotic melancholy.
Thomas Fort - 2021 - "Vertigo" (excerpt)
VERTIGO
"Vertigo" instills in the heart of works or between them a seductive disturbance. Each image becomes a residue of a general fragmented and silent frame. For several years, Lenny Rébéré has built up a vast atlas in the form of a digital database on which thousands of images taken daily from the Internet are listed. If he draws some of his subjects from it, he completes here his selection of personal photographs taken during his holidays. This mixture underlines the porosity between micro-stories and collective memory in the visual writing of history. Landscapes, lascivious bodies, close-up faces or divers then appear like afterimages, concealing a strange familiarity. Unstable indices of the “information cloud” generated by globalization, where everything is a pretext to be processed and then archived, the artist leads each of his images to the threshold of their crystallization [...]. The colored filters that cover the glass plates also set the tone. They give an artificial appearance performances while accentuating their seductive effect. These color gradients, like a whim, pervert the images, veiling them with a twilight atmosphere, between reverie and erotic melancholy.
Thomas Fort - 2021 - "Vertigo" (excerpt)
VERTIGO
"Vertigo" instills in the heart of works or between them a seductive disturbance. Each image becomes a residue of a general fragmented and silent frame. For several years, Lenny Rébéré has built up a vast atlas in the form of a digital database on which thousands of images taken daily from the Internet are listed. If he draws some of his subjects from it, he completes here his selection of personal photographs taken during his holidays. This mixture underlines the porosity between micro-stories and collective memory in the visual writing of history. Landscapes, lascivious bodies, close-up faces or divers then appear like afterimages, concealing a strange familiarity. Unstable indices of the “information cloud” generated by globalization, where everything is a pretext to be processed and then archived, the artist leads each of his images to the threshold of their crystallization [...]. The colored filters that cover the glass plates also set the tone. They give an artificial appearance performances while accentuating their seductive effect. These color gradients, like a whim, pervert the images, veiling them with a twilight atmosphere, between reverie and erotic melancholy.
Thomas Fort - 2021 - "Vertigo" (excerpt)
VERTIGO
"Vertigo" instills in the heart of works or between them a seductive disturbance. Each image becomes a residue of a general fragmented and silent frame. For several years, Lenny Rébéré has built up a vast atlas in the form of a digital database on which thousands of images taken daily from the Internet are listed. If he draws some of his subjects from it, he completes here his selection of personal photographs taken during his holidays. This mixture underlines the porosity between micro-stories and collective memory in the visual writing of history. Landscapes, lascivious bodies, close-up faces or divers then appear like afterimages, concealing a strange familiarity. Unstable indices of the “information cloud” generated by globalization, where everything is a pretext to be processed and then archived, the artist leads each of his images to the threshold of their crystallization [...]. The colored filters that cover the glass plates also set the tone. They give an artificial appearance performances while accentuating their seductive effect. These color gradients, like a whim, pervert the images, veiling them with a twilight atmosphere, between reverie and erotic melancholy.
Thomas Fort - 2021 - "Vertigo" (excerpt)
VERTIGO
"Vertigo" instills in the heart of works or between them a seductive disturbance. Each image becomes a residue of a general fragmented and silent frame. For several years, Lenny Rébéré has built up a vast atlas in the form of a digital database on which thousands of images taken daily from the Internet are listed. If he draws some of his subjects from it, he completes here his selection of personal photographs taken during his holidays. This mixture underlines the porosity between micro-stories and collective memory in the visual writing of history. Landscapes, lascivious bodies, close-up faces or divers then appear like afterimages, concealing a strange familiarity. Unstable indices of the “information cloud” generated by globalization, where everything is a pretext to be processed and then archived, the artist leads each of his images to the threshold of their crystallization [...]. The colored filters that cover the glass plates also set the tone. They give an artificial appearance performances while accentuating their seductive effect. These color gradients, like a whim, pervert the images, veiling them with a twilight atmosphere, between reverie and erotic melancholy.
Thomas Fort - 2021 - "Vertigo" (excerpt)
Passers-by
Behind the blur that crosses Lenny Rébéré's portraits, faces can be recognized, male, female or indeterminate. Here, the framing is random, as is the format of the works. This gallery of anonymous people makes up a cycle entitled “Extimit”. This refers to the Lacanian term “extimity” which, as opposed to intimacy, constitutes the voluntary exposure of oneself to the eyes of others in order to feel oneself exist. “I often draw a parallel between extimity and the ritual of social networks – not to be confused with exhibitionism. The adoption of a shortened title ‘Extimit’ resonates more like a denomination, a first name given to individuals, which reflects a kind of ambiguity, not to say cynicism, in a nod to the origin of these portraits found or in a certain way stolen”, specifies the artist.
Collected by the artist with the support of various iconographic sources, these portraits of anonymous people come as much from street surveillance cameras, Google Street View captures as from cropping of urban video scenes and personal photos. Already blurred for some when Lenny Rébéré seized them, these faces dehumanized by an extreme and pixelated cropping prolong this aesthetic tension by the artist's gesture. The latter, eager to present a crowd of anonymous people, with different temporalities and origins, chose to work on some of the frame glasses of his drawings by the action of sandblasting. He indicates: “We project an abrasive under high pressure on the glass to frost it, in the form of a flat tint or a drawing, before inking the attacked area. This becomes visible through a childish, naive drawing, close to graffiti. It is a gesture without possible repentance, as if to bring a personification to these dehumanized portraits while offering the viewer a disturbing element that can lead him to question the choice of the remanipulated portrait.”
Both through the improvised action over the drawing and on the glass of the frame, Lenny Rébéré leaves a personal trace that contaminates the anonymous. The concept of extimacy thus takes on its full meaning: in this way, “existing through the eyes of others” takes on a meaning that is as futile as it is imposed.
Maxime Gasnier for The Steidz
Extimit, 2024, crayon de couleur sur papier, 18x13 cm
Extimit, 2024, crayon de couleur sur papier, verre sablé et encré 24 x 18 cm
Extimit, 2024, crayon de couleur sur papier, verre sablé et encré 18x13 cm
Extimit, 2024, crayon de couleur sur papier, 24 x 18 cm
Extimit, 2024, crayon de couleur sur papier, verre sablé et encré , 40x30 cm
Extimit, 2024, crayon de couleur sur papier, verre sablé et encré, 30x24 cm
Extimit, 2024, crayon de couleur sur papier, verre sablé et encré 18x13 cm
Extimit, 2024, crayon de couleur sur papier, 24 x 18 cm