Marie-Jo Lafontaine

Winner of the Young Belgian Painting Prize, Marie-Jo Lafontaine has been questioning the world through photography, video installation, sculpture and painting since the 1970s. In a careful work, she suggests a macro and micro look at our society, its mutations and the dualities inherent in each of us. It is at the start of the human in its physical simplicity that it reveals all the ambiguity of humanity and of our psychic systems. The sensory of our beings is declined through leitmotifs such as the struggle between Eros and Thanatos, love and beauty and violence and destruction. She reveals a fascination for terrifying beauty, particularly in her portraits of young people, between childhood and adulthood in "Babylon babies" (2001) whose beauty and strength of the gaze are disturbing. The artist affixes to his models a consistency and an intense humanity in contrast to the images that surround us on a daily basis devoid of soul. The artist takes us on paths whose borders are blurred, she provokes judgment and refuses the single vision. In the video "Las cinco de la tarde", the sensuality of a flamenco dancer is confronted with the agony of a bull put to death during a Spanish bullfight. “Be-Side-Me 2015”, from which the silkscreen printing for S — M — M is derived, questions - in a warm and intimate diptych - the current influx of refugees to Europe. The urgency of the situation pushes the artist to create this series to express a state of the world with poetry and finesse. On the left side, we can see the vibrant vertical lines that evoke “streaming”, the perpetual movement of people across continents. On the right, the spots suggest the set of obstacles and pitfalls that migrants have to face.