Catherine Larré

Outlines of figures, faces in half-light, veiled glances, each of Catherine Larré’s pictures cmnstitutes a delicate, subtle exploration of mental landscapes, where characters are like apparitions, fragile, misled in a dream.

Sometimes a head of hair in the foreground calls to mind that special state of consciousness, at the edge between sleep and awakening, where, motionless and powerless, we see the mysterious film of our dreams.

Doubtless in these photographs the mystery is also due to a strange light, that does not reveal objects, but rather shrouds them in mist. In the daytime, that light floods models, irradiates bodies, dazzles faces, veils images.

At night, it is so muted that light rays hardly emerge from the shadow of which they seem to be prisoners.

There is something in the order of the supernatural in that universe, but nothing threatening. One feels sunken into a special, melancholic slowness that also recalls childhood rêverie, where anxiety is mixed with gentleness.

Catherine Larré succeeds in taking us back into that type of sensations, she induces us to take the time to feel the heat of a sun ray, to marvel at dew drops on a spider’s web. Let that caressing water rock you, while inhaling an iris bouquet, eyes half-shut.

Time expands, instants are suspended in silence, with a tiny perfume of eternity.

- Olivier Panchot


Don’t be seduced by the softness of the pictures, rather look at the improbable shadows along the edges of the dresses, the closed eyelids, the sunlit lace, the flutter of puff sleeves, ill-fitting nightgowns on bodies that swim in a mist, drift on dreams; tiny bodies hastily, unwillingly dressed.

These images were made scientifically in the photographer’s eye, in her mind, in the ‘dark room’, where, from which, out of the same nocturnal mist, burst imaginary memories of childhood; morbid disguises, torture inflicted on dolls beneath the unfailing, ophelian caress of sleep.

“Drapery”, Roger de Piles wrote in 1699, “should not be arranged like dress as used in society; let pleats find their own place around limbs by chance, making them appear as they are and yet stand out through the diligent device of stroking, somehow emphasizing them, with softness and tender winding”.

To reveal what is hidden, and conceal what is exposed: disquietingly familiar scenes that combine truth and the technical illusion of their own making. Confusing the tracks, giving birth and death; a transposed apocalypse where the angels themselves seem to put on the dazzling tunics of paradise lost.

- José Puig