'Digital and manipulated, Ellen Kooi's photographs explore the complexity of both the precision of detail and the treatment of color.'
The photographs of Ellen KOOI (Nl 1962) astonish. The unexpected confers an extraordinary aspect to her work.
The shots of her natural sites, often panoramic, while nourishing an impression of overflowing, are the result of a carefully studied staging, close to the theatrical scene.
The characters form the central and constitutive element of her compositions. Caught in the movement, intimately linked to the environment, they are however seized in their vulnerability, their solitude and, when the artist introduces symmetry or mirror effect, it is to reinforce the language of the body, to amplify the symbolism, to fan the vectorial charge of the scene.
Tinged with humor, unusual, absurd, surreal, the scenes convey both a proximity and a distance, soliciting both collective and particular memories, containing both dramatic tension and the lightness of the burlesque, the paradoxical.
Digital and manipulated, Ellen Kooi's photographs explore the complexity of both the precision of detail and the treatment of color. If some of her scenes are taken in low angle, awakening in the spectator a feeling of intrusion, others invite him to enter with full feet, to be part of it.