Blending fashion, editorial work, and visual art, Tarèck Raffoul's photographic style maintains the same precision and originality in the situations he composes. A young photographer, videographer, and art director living in France, Raffoul's work has already established an international presence, collaborating with several major brands and magazines.
Her latest series of photographs, "Where do we go before we sleep?", presented at the Nouchine Pahlevan gallery last fall, is built on a simple idea: how to represent the wanderings of the mind in that semi-sleep state of falling asleep. Perhaps even more so, it raises the question of this in-between, this passage between two states of body and mind. The images are strongly marked by a neon aesthetic, evoking a whole filmography, from Nicolas Winding Refn to scenes from Moonlight by Barry Jenkins. This aesthetic is also magnified in his latest editorials for Vogue Arabia or Louis Vuitton, added to its skill in staging portraits through the interplay of bodies themselves, framing that plays on what is off-screen, and the interactions between public and model through the lens.
The space of sleep, at night, is also traditionally that of metamorphosis, a space outside of time and social context. While the aesthetics and framing draw on his experience as a fashion photographer, the models and interactions chosen by Tarèck Raffoul offer intimate glimpses of the body that play with these normative aestheticizations. These moments of emptiness and metamorphosis seem recurrent in the photographer's world, quite literally in his series "Ashes to Nature," where the skin becomes a site of germination, and where the framing fragments and transforms these bodies in renewal.
Ana Bordenave
