White and Black Drama is a new project by Sophie Tramier. It revisits an 18th century ‘curiosity cabinet’ and features symbolic shapes in a dreamlike and poetic setting. This is an art form attempting convergence between painting
and photography. Graphic clarity emphasises life drama in a subtle game of perspective.
Selections from the exhibition are presented in the artist’s book “White Drama”.
Sophie Tramier reminds us of the liberty we all have to dream and wander freely, seeing beyond the limits of our consciousness. Photography is her language, her true nature, and the medium in which she can be seen and heard. Lines are pure and fluid; shadows are subtle, discreet, sometimes dark. Elements are not imposed, only suggested…
Her favorites themes are beauty, the symbolism of shapes, ambiguity, love of food, sensuality, sexuality…
The desire to take photographs comes from remembrance of her native land in the south, from Provence and Corsica. This land is beautiful, full of natural bounty where life can be sweet but also violent. From childhood, Sophie remembers innocence cradled within the poetic interplay of her senses. She tries to decipher the world through family albums. She invents stories in which the familiar faces of relatives mingle with those of strangers and characters from tales. “The world of the imaginary has always inspired me to create an object which becomes a field of study and research.” Soon, she begins to portray the people around her. As a professional photographer for over twenty- five years, she has never ceased to be driven by the satisfaction derived from her personal work.
In her pictures, her acute observations lend a penetration to her gaze. “The most anodyne of details can provide the spark for a new story”, she observes.
While in New York, Sophie was noticed for her personal and sensitive approach to portraiture, counting among her clients a famous conductor, which led her to constant search for a genuine bond with her subjects. Back in Paris, little by little, she has returned to that which has become her favorite, still life and culinary pictures.
In an attempt to capture the secrets of her unique rhythm, let ourselves be wrapped inside her mysterious and surreal compositions. She likes to push the envelope, to question without pretence. She stages the exhibit by following the immediacy of the thread. It’s enough to express the ‘inexplicable’, as in her ‘veiled bottles’ or ‘interlaced utensils’, to criticize censorship and the seclusion imposed upon women. There is no uninvolved, dry academic scrutiny either in her series ‘homme-objet’; here the roles are reversed, man is used as a contrast to reveal sensuality by confronting skins, fibers, textures…
“I like to create a disturbing atmosphere by playing with daylight, backlights and subdued lighting …”
Journeying through this new exhibition, is as if “White and Black Drama” causes us to follow in its wake through a universe of blacks and whites where the strength of the material meets the symbolism of the shape. To awaken the intimacy of this experience, she delicately pushes at the edges of our memory, folding it, extracting from it both silence and breath, traces of half-remembered emotions or ever-present feelings. This is what she wants us to share.
“I chose boxes as decoration because I liked the partitioned aspect which demands that the observer has to, as it were, peer down into a miniature theatre to establish the story line. Powdery white, almost flaking plaster enhances the enigmatic, ephemeral aspect of the comedy involving animals and daily objects paired without apparent connection.
She remarks: “Here, the animals refer to my illustrated childhood books, such as ‘Alice in Wonderland’ or ‘The Little Prince’. I wanted a pared-down design to emphasize the importance of every element, which is both symbolic and meaningful to the composition. A single line, like Ariadne’s thread, connects objects and animals converging to a whole. Each of us is free to follow the thread in his own way, to imagine his own story. The eyes glide from visible to invisible, causing a reality hitherto unobtainable to emerge, an in-between, an intuition… “
Chantal Colomer
EXHIBITION
White & Black Drama de Sophie Tramier
Through May 3rd, 2015
Little Big Galerie
45 rue Lepic
75018 Paris
France
