Laurent Elie Badessi

Selected Works     Biography     Press Release

Skin

March 23 - April 29, 2000

Cristinerose Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Skin, black and white photographs by French photographer Laurent Elie Badessi and his first solo show in New York City.

In his photographs, Badessi emphasizes the human body as a mirror of nature by placing nudes in dramatic landscapes and melding contrasts of textures and shapes into images of natural beauty. With elegant minimalism, he extrapolates the harmony between opposites of black and white, man and nature, fluid curves and straight lines. Unity emerges from the difference and similarities between the body and nature itself. Badessi juxtaposes human bodies of all types with natural elements to produce unexpected encounters. Head, hair, neck, shoulders, arm, wrist, belly, chest, torso, back, knees, legs and feet with plants, rocks, mountains, sand, salt, water and animals.

Badessi first draws the concepts he envisions, then with photography he freezes forms, matter, and colors by drawing with light. The body becomes a line, curve, texture and then contrast, a combination to create a symbiosis uniting the fragile and the sharp, tender and tough, black and white, masculine and feminine, mankind and nature.

Harmony through contrast. A skull, a knee, an outstretched arm, a hand, a back, a belly of a pregnant woman. Badessi assembles these bodies and take them apart again, thus giving birth to forms that are often graphic and sometimes abstract. He is like a sculptor, fashioning the body with his hands, chiseling it with his lens, using the lines as raw material for integrating everything into a coherent whole.

The appeal of this unique work on human form is complemented and enhanced by the contribution of 65 world-famous artists and personalities from the fields of art, fashion, film, dance, music and literature, each of whom has dedicated a very personal, handwritten and signed commentary to a selected photograph. The result is Skin, a beautiful hardcover book published by Edition Stemmle, Switzerland, and distributed in the United States by Abbeville Press. Among the text contributors are Pedro Almodovar, Agnes B., John Bartlett, Peter Beard, Pierre Cardin, Quentin Crisp, Merce Cunningham, Philip Glass, Bill T. Jones, Karl Lagerfeld, Maxwell, Thierry Mugler, Todd Oldham, Charlotte Rampling, Andres Serrano, Anne Rice, Susan Sontag, John Waters, Robert Wilson and many others.

The forward of the book is written by Sondra Gilman, Chairman and founder of the department of photography of the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York. A portion of the author's royalties from the sale of the book will be donated to a non-profit AIDS organization.