Les suspendus



EN

Largely inspired by The Defaming Portrait and by the hung man's figure, the series Les Suspendus uses assemblage and montage to rephrase a new reality, which combines two images in a series of several diptychs. Agnès Geoffray interrogates the fictional power of imagery through her own staging and through assembled images. She accomplishes this by presenting multiple associations to the idea of suspension as a frozen moment between falling and ascension, collapsing and rising. Geoffray creates a gap and confusion between preexisting images and her own, which makes the resulting image appear as if it is part of an archive. Geoffray multiplies the references, axes of meaning of the text and genres of her work through still life, archive and stage settings to create a space, which plays with the unlimited possibilities of interpretation. The images convey the relic of the gestures and the violence connected to them, like a memory or a future memory of disorders and disasters.



FR

Largement inspirée de La peinture infamante et de la figure du pendu, la série Les Suspendus procède de l’assemblage et du montage comme une reformulation d’une nouvelle réalité. Un assemblage de deux images, une série de plusieurs diptyques. A partir de ses propres mises en scène ou d’images collectées, Agnès Geoffray interroge la puissance fictionnelle de l’image, en engrangeant des associations multiples autour de l’idée de suspens, ce moment gelé entre la chute et l’ascension, l’effondrement et l’élévation. Créer une béance et une confusion entre des images préexistantes et ses propres images qu’elle manipule jusqu’à leur donner un aspect d’archive. Démultiplier les référents, les niveaux de lectures, les genres : nature morte, archive, mise en scène, afin de créer un espace jouant avec les possibilités illimitées des interprétations. Les images convoquent une survivance des gestes et la violence qui leur est attachée, comme une mémoire ou future mémoire de désordres et de désastres. La série Les Suspendus révèle ainsi la potentialité dramatique de toute image.





Through her photographs, texts, and filmed work, Agnès Geoffray has developed an oeuvre that explores the fictional, inventive potential of multiple representations of reality. Her work exists in the interstitial, ambivalent space between fiction and reality, resisting any univocal interpretation. Often elaborated from archival sources and human interest stories, her projects hinge on a process of fictionalized re-elaboration similar to a task of re-enactment or displacement as studied as it is evasive. Geoffray likes collages, assemblages, intersections and superimpositions of fragile moments and hovering spatio-temporal situations. This is particularly evident in the diptychs displayed here. All of them, to varying degrees, test the idea of a frozen moment, hovering between rise and fall, erection and collapse. They also refer to the reversibility of poses and situations, of formal and gestural archetypes, expressing the enduring nature of certain actions beyond the various contexts and situations incarnating them. Beyond straightforward formal association (accompanied here by changes in scale), each of these diptychs of course establishes a complicitous atmosphere of interwoven, open-ended semantic connections. In fact, the diptychs function both individually and as a group, like so many snatches of a story or stories that we must continue to spin out. The confusion existing between found or pre-existing images is underscored by the fact that Geoffray doesn’t hesitate to rework and manipulate her own photos, down to their very grain, in an effort to lend them the appearance of archive images.

Emmanuel Lambion, independent curator, Found in translation Casino Luxembourg