Patrick Sarfati
"Keith Haring: Body Painting, Paris, 1985"

Exhibition: 4 October – 2 November, 2024
Opening: Thursday, 3 October, 2024

The David Guiraud Gallery is pleased to present an exceptional series of photographs taken by Patrick Sarfati in 1985, showing the American artist Keith Haring creating a body painting on a young Parisian model.

This is most certainly the only reportage showing Keith Haring in the process of creating a body painting. From Ludovic's bare chest, the images show the painter moving around his model, brush in hand, gradually completing the body painting with each stroke.

Images of body paintings by Keith Haring are familiar but rare; only a few photographers have immortalized these ephemeral works: dancer Bill T. Jones photographed by Tseng Kwong Chi in 1983, Grace Jones photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe in 1984, and the artist painted by himself and photographed by Annie Leibovitz in 1986.

Andy Warhol took a few pictures while Keith Haring was painting Grace Jones, but the series presented here is the most complete known collection, providing a true reportage of the artist’s performance.

The gallery has selected eight images to create a series documenting Keith Haring performing a body painting.

The exhibition also showcases a set of portraits of the artist, captured by Patrick Sarfati at the time of this happening. For the exhibition, the artist also produced a large print (100 x 70 cm) of his two contact sheets, showing the entire session.

Patrick Sarfati is a French photographer, born in Carthage (Tunisia) in 1958.

In the early 1960s, his family returned to France and settled in Marseille. In 1978, he moved to Paris and immersed himself in the intellectual scene of Saint Germain des Prés, associated with Sartre and de Beauvoir. He frequented the famous Drugstore as well as the nightclubs of the Opera district, such as the Bronx, Pimm’s, Colony, and Sept, where the gay community, artists, and jet-set mingled. Patrick Sarfati then connected with the personalities he had always admired and seized the opportunity to capture their portraits.

He openly pursued male photography, becoming one of its leading representatives in France. He followed the path paved by American Physique Photography of the 1940s/1960s, deliberately seeking to showcase the beauty of the male body. He published Illusions in 1985 and Athletes in 1990, both prefaced by Edmund White. He also collaborated with various publications (Magazine, Masque, Le Gai Pied) and Parisian clubs (Le Palace, for which he created flyers, the Banana, Amazonial).

Alongside these activities, Patrick Sarfati posed as a model for photographers Pierre et Gilles, and helped Jean-Paul Gaultier showcase his first collection, "Homme Objet," by organizing an impromptu casting during which he hired the young Jean-Claude Van Damme, then an unknown passing through Paris. In this context, he met painter Keith Haring, whom he introduced to the clandestine Paris of the time, leading to the body painting featured in our exhibition.