Agathe Naïto
Annabel Aoun Blanco
Impermanence
Annabel Aoun Blanco's interest in the suspended instant between life and death is expressed through evolving sequences of photographs. The face is the central focus of her work. It is photographed underwater, or in milk, through a steamed-up window or from a mould in white plaster. As she refines her artistic expression, she arranges and transforms the lines of the face but their coherence remains. Are they funerary masks or sleeping faces? The frontier is fragile, it is unsettling and has a quality of elusiveness refined here by a seductive aesthetic.
Inspired by the Japanese origins of her father, Agathe Naïto delves into Japanese culture from the sober forms of porcelain to the fragile lightness of haïku. Her works speak of the universality of human experiences such as hunger and the culture of the meal, bodily matter, the memories of old people. We find therefore magnified hairs and prints of the spine, vegetables, clouds or skies which are drawn from the photographs taken by her Japanese grandmother as a kind of diary.