Smith makes no secret of it: their approach to the visible, luminous and dark at the same time, is an image of the uncertainty of gender roles.
The gallery is pleased to present Smith's first solo exhibition in Paris. This young French artist graduated from the School of Photography in Arles in 2010. They have been a resident at Le Fresnoy, Studio National des Arts Contemporains in Tourcoing for the past year and a half.
Smith, through their various photographic series and the video installation C19H28O2 (agnès), produced by the Fresnoy in 2011, which will be presented at the gallery, explores the question of (trans)gender.
Smith makes no secret of the fact that their approach to the visible, luminous and dark at the same time, is an image of the uncertainty of gendered roles. The question of gender, thematized for more than twenty years by philosophy (first and foremost by the American Judith Butler) plays a significant role in the intellectual development of his work.
But like all authentic artists, and beyond the issues of gender, Smith first explores a formal universe. Some have identified in his images an echo of Renaissance painting, others a romantic vein. What is it about? Is it the gravity of Florentine portrait painting, or the sometimes twilight landscapes of his backgrounds? Or is it the shadowy fervor of a German painter like Caspar David Friedrich: doesn't a landscape fragment in the Löyly series contain a sort of miniature replica of one of his snowy peaks? If I were to attempt a comparison that would do more justice to the almost pietistic quality of this series (often seen in other sets such as Sub Limis or Spree), I could think, not without risk, of the universe of the Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøï. In his work, a wisely immobile figure, standing in an interior where silence sounds, a seated naked woman or simply a few diamonds of light cast by the sun in a room, are enough to convey a spirituality without embarrassment. One might find the stained glass austerity of some Scandinavian Lutheran church. There is a "Nordic" tropism in Smith's work, and another towards Central Europe.