Lucile Boiron

WOMB

Lucile Boiron explores and exhausts fragments of flesh, moments where man’s nature appears for what it is above all, corruptible. Far from drawing up an inventory of revulsion, she questions the biological truth of bodies, a photographic response to the question of good and bad taste.

To us who no longer see it, the body reminds us of its true condition, a territory carrying shared but unique states, vector of the traces of stories that only experienced skins understand.

When the already dead thing parodies the living one, decomposition delivers to the rotting a matter which is repugnant. In a logic of its own, flesh sucks and swallows itself, engulfs itself, rejects itself to disintegrate, migrating from the solid state to the liquid state. Like bodily fluids, the photographer’s still lifes wander between these two indeterminate states.

Visual feast, cannibal vision, happiness to tear and shred. The women photographed by Lucile Boiron devour the world from the seat of the sensitive. The close-up leads to the very heart of the origin. The scene is played out since time immemorial, with inexplicable pleasure, with the hands, with the help of the mandibles and all the muscles. They all replay with delight the moments of rediscovery of the wild.

Here, the socialized body does not cease to revolt. It lets us see that it is the seat of reality, the subject of the photograph. It turns into language, accumulating inscriptions. The pleasure and the vermin form the horizon of a daily life strewn with moods. On and under the skin, in contact with the meat, an infinity of strange entities proliferate. Lucile Boiron tracks down the itching, the redness, the varicose veins… There is no scarlet skin in the real world, only emanations that impose themselves as signs. Signs that we reject, out of disgust, because we consider them demeaning.

The seductive ambivalence of the ugly and the repulsive arouses a pleasure to replay the animality and morbid enjoyment of contemplation. Swarming maggots, raw meat, decaying fruits, these haunting images obsess as much as they revolt.

Skin emergences, contrary to what morals say, are not the consequence of internal disturbances or an inflicted punishment. Photography has some difficulties to face scabs, discharges and scars. It only sees a mirror of the soul. Poor Job, covered with ulcers, knows what the price of his redemption is. The psychologization of the representation of the body has this annoying tendency to consider it as potentially guilty and unfit. Wrinkles, pimples, calluses, traces of smallpox would be metaphorical realities, the indisputable stigmata of faults committed, confessions of the turpitudes of its owner.

Here, he is as close to reality as possible, because this is how men live…

Translation of an original text by François Cheval

June 2019