My images often explore the friction between the real and the imaginary.
“Mise en Abyme” conveys the different layers at play in this new body of work and marks a departure from my previous works although I revisit my first subject matter – swimming pools. But this time the focus is not on public swimming pools (like it was the case in my series "The Pool"). Like a trespasser, I entered the intimate space of people’s private pools to capture large-scale tableaux oscillating between abstraction and representation, movement and stillness, gravity and weightlessness.
In this new work, the pool is not the main subject in a literal sense, and the images are not mere representation of the mundane activities revolving around water. It is more about shape, color, texture and the depiction of a world at the edge of the real and surreal. I see the pool more as a metaphor, a mirror whose surface reflects the surrounding world but is also a gate into another - dreamlike - world, a sort of mise en abyme. Here, the water becomes a transformative membrane, where the distorted bodies and landscapes echo physical dissolutions and sliding states of mind - a sort of mental imprisonment from which to escape.
I intentionally flipped some of the images upside down as I like to use photography to challenge the familiar perception we have of the world and I often see my pictures as a bridge between the world we live in and a more surreal and dreamlike dimension. I think that aspect in my work is not only created by the sometimes-unusual angles, but also by the color palette I use, which gives the images a painterly quality. Brush strokes - almost palpable in her chalky white clouds - and washed-out skies - reminiscent of watercolors - are side by side with the kindled waters of swimming pools, shimmering like candy wrapper… I do find inspiration in painting, both abstract and figurative, and some of the images in the series echo some modern and contemporary painters - such as Francis Bacon or David Hockney - and evoke David Lynch's surreal and nightmarish worlds.
