Brno Del Zou: pure and hybrid presence

By Caroline Canault.

Photographer, sculptor and video artist, Brno Del Zou offers an atypical architecture of the body, a codification of shattered attitudes.

He takes pictures of faces and bodies under various angles. The complete image rests on the combination of several prints, interwoven in a personal manner that the eye grasps and then assembles. The body as a space is distorted but remains identifiable in its fragmented representation.

Our senses are confronted with the absurd. A mental image appears, depending on our capacity to memorize detail; an expressive gaze, a half-open mouth, freckles… As many discreet traces or more expressive narrative references that rupture the surface.

These new, manufactured skins drape strangers, shot in black and white, caught between the clear and the obscure, between presence and absence.

Tension, points of instability, electrifying fragments … The recomposed portrait accentuates the presence of the model and begins to speak by imposing confrontation in sync with what the viewer is seeing and thinking.

The photographer divests himself of all esthetics, all useless ornaments, avoiding temporal or circumstantial elements. He condenses reality, shifting the very question of bearings.

A mixture of photography and sculpture, the portraits of Brno Del Zou set the stage for pure presence, hybrid and polysemic, a presence which brings together reality, dreamworlds and surprises.