Joel Denot

The work of Joël Denot is entirely based on his photo shots and on the action of taking the photographs, without any retouches in the laboratory.

In all his works, one can identify a subject, an image, a body. At a first look though, his work doesn't seem to be photographic: It is rather pictorial, reminding us of abstract painting. One has the feeling of being in front of a painting rather than a photograph.

The image needs time to reveal itself; the artist's body, present in most of his images, seems to be drowning in color.

His pieces reveal a mix of playful, colorful and luminous shapes that don't evoke anything in particular; they are just overlaps of surfaces or assemblages of monochromes. The dimensions of his prints remind us more of the dimensions of paintings than of common photographic formats (even if these formats can go today from the size of a postcard to that of a large painting).

Joël Denot is one of those artists who react against the multiplication of images and, in his field, he is against taking photos only for the sake of documenting the world. His photographs are taken with a camera and their support is photographic paper.

For him, photography is close to its original purpose: it is the unveiling of things through light, it is an appearance. The daguerreotypes, the first photographic images were, of course, images of reality, but they were most importantly elusive, ghostlike images of light.