Olivia LAVERGNE
FICTIONS
4 - 27 November 2016

Olivia Lavergne works on the perception and the metamorphosis of landscapes. The settings constantly court reality in her images where the landscape is “artialised” and becomes a ground for play and experimentation. What is true is not directly opposed to false here, illusion being perhaps more credible than reality.

Exploring imaginary lands, Olivia Lavergne endeavours to blur all geographical ref- erences to transport the viewer into a fictional space that has been totally trans- formed by her lens and by the subtle devices that she implements. In her series Jungles, the viewer is immersed in a tropical forest with a fascinating lux- uriance and strange beauty beckoning to be explored.

With Anywhere out of the world – a title borrowed from Baudelaire – the scenery is composed of landscapes and the layout of the image enables new visual and poet- ic combinations that open the path to the creativity of the venues.

The play with illusion lies in the process that demonstrates the materiality of the light with which the artist literally sculpts the landscape, the light that creates the visible and suggests the invisible.

Olivia Lavergne likes to cast doubt upon the sense of reality and reflects on the production and appearance of illusions conducive to intrigue. Using the rules of painting just as much as those of cinema, she establishes a link between reality and fiction. “I like to seek reality in fiction and vice-versa.”

The structure of the forms, complementarity between colours, contrast between dark and light, day for night are all conducive to reinterpreting reality and to the con- struction of an otherworldliness that is both intimate and mysterious, to “producing an image that contains both what it shows and what it conceals.”

Through her images we become immersed in an unpredictable and unsettling adventure where the photographer weaves the tenuous ins and outs of emotion with ingenuity and grace.