JEAN-VINCENT SIMONET
IN AN AUTOBIOGRAPHIC MISE EN ABYME, THE 31-YEAR-OLD FRENCH PHOTOGRAPHER HAS TAKEN HIS FATHER’S PRINT SHOP AS THE SUBJECT FOR HIS NEW SERIES, HEIRLOOM, WHICH IS BEING SHOWN IN THE CURIOSA SECTION AT PARIS PHOTO.
Faced with the flood, the abundance but also the disembodiment of images in the 21st century, Jean- Vincent Simonet aspires to revive their aura and their physicality. With their hallucinatory colours, liquid shapes and shifting contours, the young Frenchman’s photographs are distinctly painterly: urbanity dissolves into phantasmagorical skies illuminated by the city’s lights, petals become liquid stains dripping onto each other, naked bodies resemble cyborgs or dolls with their supernatural shine and hues, while industrial machines are reduced to abstraction, a jumble of blurred and contrasting components.
Although Simonet’s interest in images developed at a young age, the Isère native soon favoured the camera over pencils and paintbrushes. Because of its immediacy, photography seemed to him the ideal outlet for his creativity, especially when he discovered the infinite transformative possibilities of Photoshop. But, during his studies at ECAL in Switzerland, he began to feel the limits of the medium, until the day he inserted photographic paper upside down into the printer. From that moment on, whether analogue or digital, photography became for him the first step in a long process of image transformation that he describes as “destructive.” Experimenting with the professional machines in his father’s print shop in Bourgoin- Jallieu, he printed with inkjet on plastic instead of paper, which slows the drying process and allows him to play with the fresh droplets with his finger,
after which he dips the prints in water and oil before drying them, thus developing a whole range of tools that, in his words, “hack and contaminate the image by subtracting matter.” “When my photos go to print,” he continues, “they wake up. This is the moment of erosion I’m looking for.”
Fascinated by video games such as Elden Ring and Japanese animated films like Akira and Ghost in the Shell, Simonet seeks to translate the fantasy dimension of science fiction into his images. A profusion of bright, venomous colours, visual saturation, enigmatic faces and night lights permeate In Bloom, a series of almost dreamlike images shot in Japan that plunges us into a country at the edge of reality. His next project, Waterworks, will go one further in questioning the way images are reproduced: he plans to print multiple copies of the same set of 66 shots – portraits, nudes, flowers, etc. – each time modifying the processing of the prints.
In 2021, spending the entire summer in his father’s print shop to process his images, Simonet decided to make the atelier itself the subject of a new series, Heirloom. Steeped in family history and his childhood memories, the print shop reveals all its poetic potential via his gaze through the lens: close-ups of the insides of machines or tools, paper rolls invading space or labels piled up on desks. “Machines at a standstill are like sleeping animals,” confides Simonet, who shot most of the images at night when the print shop’s employees were absent. Departing from the Pop aesthetics that had become something of a trademark, this project brings an unexpected softness to an industrial world that is usually considered cold and uncaring, an effect achieved through colour alteration and blurring of outlines – techniques that have become his signature.