Credendo Vides 017, 2016

Jean-Michel Rousvoal  

Jean-Michel Rousvoal is a French photographer born in 1967 who lives and works in Pontoise, France. He discovered photography during his adolescence and decided to make it his profession. He is a graduate of the Ecole Nationale Louis Lumière. After ten years spent in a professional photographic laboratory, he created his studio in 1992 and began collaborating with large companies. He also takes the time to forge his gaze, to educate his eye in contact with painting, photography... A desire to see in order to feed on their history, their traditions and their symbols and which gradually gives rise to personal work. He presents a first major series "Credendo Vides" in 2016 during an exhibition in his studio in Pontoise. In 2018, he was selected to participate in the European Festival of Nude Photography in Arles with his series "La Madeleine Repentante". The Van Gogh space then allowed him to fully deploy the scale of his large formats. The assumed pictorial character of some of his series, staged in baroque luxuriance, dotted with references, invites us to cross the mirror of time, a time that stretches and leaves its mark. The alchemy implemented also finds its source in the "black" of the silver laboratory, and thus extends with digital and pigment prints. If here photography plays with its limits in a symbolic profusion, other series focus on the body alone or on a landscape to capture the essential in a suspended moment of silence.