ARTISTIC APPROACH
Véronique Bourlon sees photography as a place of self experience.
In her work, she appeals to the unconscious of the images as much as to the unconscious of each individual and strives to create mental landscapes that are inscribed in the movement of bodies, plants, and even inanimate objects - eternal restart or eternal return.
In her images, human passions are in the foreground, and the atmospheres oscillate between proximity and strangeness. As in a dream where the enigmatic reality is nevertheless very present for the protagonists.
Looking back on oneself, questioning one's being, the impermanence of the world: Véronique Bourlon summons the dreamlike, which exposes our interiority in the face of these questions. In this eroding temporality, she crosses over wonder, pleasure, fears, loss and the unknown. So many flaws that emerge with a certain anxiety in many of her photos.
Véronique Bourlon allows sensations, emotions and perceptions to open up. Through a game of appearance and disappearance, sometimes in deep darkness, the viewer's gaze and imagination are always stimulated in a slow and deep immersion.
BIOGRAPHY
Visual artist, Véronique Bourlon lives and works in Paris.
Being a playwright and director for ten years, she began coordinating artistic projects and managing french cultural structures in 1996. In parallel to her career, she never stops writing. Since 2020, she has been pursuing her artistic practice and focusing on visual writing through the medium of photography.
Her series, Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil), born during the first lockdown, shows photographs of flowers framed as tightly as possible, as if they were being stalked. Noticed by 9 Lives magazine in the spring of 2020, she published a book with Bec en l'air Editions. An exhibition was held in 2020 in Paris, at New Galerie, then in 2021 at the Salon dans la cour.
She continued with two photographic series, pursuing her exploration of the floral motif, which she links to the intimate, in 2021, with Zone tropicale (Tropical Zone) and En ton absence (When you're not there).
She then works at the crossroads of photography and experimental cinema, using her images of flowers as living material. Lose yourself with me is her first film. It has been screened at the Nuits photo in Paris, at the Holy Art Gallery in London, at the Côté court festival in Pantin and at the Festival du regard in Cergy-Pontoise in 2021 and 2022, at the Festival international de Films de femmes de Créteil, at the Cinémathèque française in 2023 and at Rencontres Internationales Traverse in Toulouse, in 2024.
She is continuing her photographic work with a new serie, Summer Night'S Dreams, in 2023 - the changeover of urban parks at nightfall, when people and nature dissolve into the archaic fears of the night - but she is currently finalising two projects.
The first is The Kiss, a new experimental film about the troubled state of desire between women in a blurred temporality.
And Ecstasies, a 'floral' installation specially created for the Promenades photographiques de Blois in the summer of 2024, at the Pavillon Anne de Bretagne.
SCREENINGS
Lose yourself with me
> Promenades photographiques, Blois, 2024
> Rencontres Internationales Traverse, Toulouse, 2024
> Cinémathèque Française, Paris, 2023
> Festival international de films de femmes, Créteil, 2023
> Festival du regard, Cergy-Pontoise, 2022
> Bloom Party, Régal Montpellier, 2022
> Côté court Festival, Pantin, 2022
> The Holy Art Gallery, London, 2022
> Les Nuits photo, Paris, 2021
EXHIBITIONS
Summer Night's Dreams (extract)
> Promenades photographiques, Blois, 2024
The Flowers of Evil (Les fleurs du mal),
> Le Salon dans la cour, Paris, 2021
> New Galerie, Paris, 2020
PUBLICATION
> Les fleurs du mal, Le Bec en l'air Editions, 2020
PRESS
> Carte blanche to Marion Scemama : Véronique Bourlon, birth of a photographic gesture,
9 Lives magazine, 2020
To be found here.