Cyril Carret's work develops patiently, silently, a singular universe. The photography is here the ultimate stage of seizure of a long and meticulous work of plastic creation which takes its roots in the relationship with the material. The raw material, the trivial material, even the waste sometimes is got back, accumulated then ordered by the artist who appears to sculpt transcend it in subtle and bright compositions. Through this precise, stubborn shaping happens an order, aesthetic then photographic, which transforms it radically, and which shows the metamorphosis. The work then adorned to reveal, in its forms and its puzzling compositions, what the world can have of profoundly dreamlike. The photography stops our look, and calls it to the pondering, thanks to a set of contrasts which destabilises it: between the triviality of the materials and the beauty of the composition; between the extreme visual precision and the produced shady emotion; between its photographic nature and its obvious links to sculpture or paintings.
Whenever it’s about portraits, still lives or puzzling plastic layouts, every photography works the paradox to disturb, attract, deepen our vision. It is a game with the somber and the bright, the trash and the sublime, the harmless and the mysterious. The image destabilises our sight, renews it, densifies and opens it.
The series “CELLULE" offers us the portrait of naked bodies with faces embeded in masks which enclose them. These masks patiently made, like somber jewels, lock entirely the faces that become invisible, forced, imprisoned. Whereas bodies show themselves as they stand in their nudity, the individuality disappears behind the mask. And we feel its subjection as well as its desire of emancipation, probably painful. The series shows bodies without make-up in a motionless and fixed movement and faces adorned but totally locked. The artist builds portraits which show the dissonance between our quest for freedom and all which imprisons us, between our desire of others and our solitude. The image, skillfully elaborated, shows then the tension which crosses our human condition. And the artwork, again, pushes us in this demanding universe to show through its beauty as well our confinement as our difficult quest of ourselves.
