Vanité du Pêcheur, 2017

Jean-Michel Rousvoal  

Technique: Print on varnished canvas and mounted on frame. Jean-Michel Rousvoal was born in Paris in 1967. He discovered photography as a teenager and decided to make it his profession. He graduated from the Louis Lumière national school. After ten years spent in a professional photographic laboratory, he created his studio in 1992 and began to collaborate 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 be nourished by their stories, their traditions and their symbols and which is gradually giving birth to a personal job. He presented his first large 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 allows it to fully deploy the scale of its large formats. The assumed pictorial character of some of his series staged all in baroque luxuriance, strewn with references, invites us to cross the mirror of time, a time that stretches and leaves its mark. The alchemy used also finds its source in the “black" of the silver laboratory, and thus extends to 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.