HSBC France 109, Champs Elysées 75008 Paris France
Difficult not to be interested in the unusual background of Lucille Reyboz that we can glimpse behind these images, not to wonder about the motifs of her experience in Japan after an earlier, very intense, experience in Africa. Her relationship with music – certain musicians in particular, certain types of musical resonance – no doubt also plays a role. Even more than for the works of other photographers, to read her images it is necessary to understand her personality, her sensibility. In the words of Miquel Barcelo, who wrote the preface to her book on Africa: "most of the time, the subjects of Lucille's photos are right at the tip of her fingers."
This exhibition, which brings together various phases of her work on Japan, is organised around three main motifs: bathing, onsen in Japanese, bound trees, a series inspired by the practice of bondage, and bento, whose name is taken from the multi-compartment lunchbox that accompanies travellers and that contains small portions of the different elements making up a meal. From these three motifs is born a series of photographs strictly organised both in terms of style and subject, while Lucille Reyboz's Japan tells a story in which her gaze floats freely, through the seasons, from one reality to another. While in appearance these series are very different, they are linked by the recurring presence of the body, in varied forms. Presence in the literal sense: physical first of all, in the onsens, where the female body dialogues with the water and the rock surrounding it. We find ourselves imagining Lucille sharing with her subjects, even before photographing them, the pleasures of this immersion in the naturally warm and soothing waters, the sensations linked to the striking contrast between the watery environment and the air around it. She spontaneously talks of the symbolic aspect of this practice, which for some Japanese people has a ritual value: the rite of purification of the body, in the same way as the soul must be purified in the temples. But in a more unconscious or secret way, this bathing also bears witness to the desire of the human being to relive something of the original, pre-birth experience.
On the visual level, the series of photographs can also be seen as an exploration of the different postures of the body moving through the water, the subtle play of reflections, the distortions created when the camera is placed at certain angles to the surface of the water. Her investigation is not simply plastic: from all these photographs there emanates a – very Japanese - impression of extraordinary calm and serenity.
In the series of trees bound with red cord, the body is presented through metaphor. The series is inspired by a Japanese practice, bondage, which belongs to a very different register from the bath, a practice whose origins date back to a period when corporal punishment was common. The punitive impulse is here transferred to the field of sexuality, taking on a different dimension and meaning, as revealed recently, for instance, in the photographs of Nobuyoshi Araki.
Here bondage is applied to trees, but its rules are followed to the letter: in Japan, any practice, no matter how absurd it may appear to our eyes, obeys certain rules. Bondage, seen as the geometry of figures delineated by the cords, is practised with extreme precision. In these photographs, it adopts the shape and contours of the trunks subtly framed by the photographer to suggest resemblances with parts of the body, some very intimate. But over and above these references, the photographs reveal a sense of composition and a mastery of the textural effects evoked in this series: the constant, saturated red of the cord contrasts with the manifold nuances of the tree bark.
In this transposition of bondage, nature is constrained and hemmed in, although not deprived of life, indeed quite the opposite. The exaltation of nature expressed by Lucille Reyboz, the sublimation of matter, both plant and mineral, can be found in an arrangement that combines several photographic images modelled on the bento, the "lunchbox" that juxtaposes different tastes and flavours. In each of her bentos, Lucille brings together fragments from different worlds - stones, animals, parts of bodies, plants - whose close juxtaposition evokes a range of sensations.
This importance placed on the sensations aroused by nature and certain textures can be traced back to Lucile Reyboz's African experience, which played a decisive role in constructing her personality and the development of her photography. She frequently evokes the animism characterising the religious rites practised in some parts of Africa, as in Mali where Lucille lived for a time and a village in Togo that occupies a particularly preponderant place in her trajectory – animism, which is, precisely, the belief that a spirit inhabits the bodies of animals and certain works of nature. It is something of this spirit that Lucille Reyboz strives to reveal through a photographic work guided by a sensitive eye that remains true to her emotions.
Gabriel Bauret