Lives and works since 1970.
Evidence
Evidence, as in the french meaning but also in the english sense of "proof"and "testimony", is what Cecile Paris photographs. She shoots as if she were taking notes, looking at details, at small casual happenings on the ground, in corners and blind spots. Out of the tinyest indications she brings into view what is unjustly referred to as the banal. Banality : pictures of deja-vu, fantasy made up of idealised platitudes (the dream of leaving, of exoticism), representations of domestic life (nature posters, poted plants, mobile homes). Like the work of Peter Fischli & David Weiss or Philippe Durand, Cecile Paris points to the fleeting indicators of modernity with humourous empathy, a "tourist" point of view. Strolling around with false nonchalance, she uses her camera not to magnify but to record a mix of the visible and the déja-vu.
Her picture taking is undemonstrative. Cécile Paris, as in an herbarium, gathers and samples; through serial and kinship organising she will associate a puddle of mud with a gleaming sports car, ironically recuperating the world of male stereotypes, such as when filming a girl mimiking guitar hero postures she expresses its violent erotic symbolism. Just like "campness" used by the gay communities in the 60's and 70's in the USA to politicaly undermine the prevailing aesthetic codes, Cecile Paris is seeking to instill a feminine edge in this iconography without perverting it, conscious of social representational images present in modern culture, focused yet distanced. In a most recent series, "Alert", she shoots, as usual, deserted areas, where traces of humanity often appear in the rearrangement of nature (a landscape neatly and meticulously cut up by identical rooftops, a large concrete lot in front of a mountain cottage, a rural fresco painted in realistic socialist style on a truck). But these apparently calm pictures make you believe that something is about to happen, just like the hidden drama in the pictures of Blow Up. The photographs of Cécile Paris are evidence of the too quiet appearance of things.
François Piron
Translation: Brian W. Stevens