Agnès Geoffray interview on France Culture
In this interview (in french), the artist Agnès Geoffray talks about her work at the occasion of her solo exhibition Les chutes at Galerie Maubert (Paris) in september 2022.
She also talks about how she started manipulating existing images, a recurrent approach in her artistic practice today : “It departed from family archives, a photography of my father as a child, swimming in a pond. He seemd lost, isolated in this space. In this very small picture, he was smiling. I removed his smile. I made a tragedy out of a playful scene. This first approach of alteration from a family image opened a lot of perspectives in my work”.
Later, she says : “For some of my images, I deteriorate myself the images, by adding texture, turning them into black and white, giving them the appearance of archives.”
She also talks about her series Incidental gestures, where she manipulates the photographs digitally by adding or removing elements, such as repairing the face of a disfigured soldier, or adding a dress to the figure of a naked women during the liberation.
Agnès Geoffray, Incidental Gestures, Gueule cassée, 30x34 cm / 10x14 cm, 2011
Agnès Geoffray, Incidental Gestures, Libération, dyptique, 22x34 cm, 2011"It was pacification gestures, rethinking these hurful images, these representations of victims that were frozen for eternity into defamatory postures. It’s not to revisit history, but to rethink these figures, give them back a status. Through digital manipulation, to free them from an humiliating posture, and give them a symbolic iconographic sepulcher”.
“I like to scrutinize, to fragment, to probe images, sometimes as an iconographer, because I interrogate them and put them into light. I think our role as an artist is to put images back into light.
︎ Listen to the full interview on France Culture.
Details from the exhibition Les chutes at Galerie Maubert