Stéphanie Desvaux

Stephanie Desvaux, born in Mauritius in 1969, is given her first camera at the age of twelve. In the early stages of her artistic career, she takes a lot of portraits, mainly in schools, then works with Tristan Bréville at the Musée de la Photographie in the nineties. In 1994, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie selects four of her black and white photographs, which are now a part of their image bank. Nonetheless, she discontinues her practice for fifteen years to care for her family. She resumes photography in 2010, intent on putting on a solo exhibition. Stephanie explains that she has always viewed her practice as a passion, which means experimenting and relying on intuition to dictate her self-taught practice. ​ In 2011, no longer wanting to do reporting (which she had done twenty years earlier) she begins to photograph tree trunks, which inspire a new direction. She exposes this new series at the Imaaya gallery in a solo exhibition — «Omo» (face in Japanese). She renounces the complexity of forms, describing her photography as an act which “efface les frontières […], elle est la colle du monde.” (An act which dissolves barriers and holds together the world.) With exceptionally keen powers of observation, she records subtle nuances of colour, shape and light that enliven her photographs. Her photography is minimalistic and poignant. She plays around with angles, losing the notion of distance, never in too close proxi- mity to her subjects. Denatured, her subjects lose their utilitarian functions. Stephanie revives them through photography’s expressive potential, demonstrating that its value lays beyond reproducing the outlines of the world around us. She photographs mechanically, with-out giving it much thought. She does not mull over the possibilities of a theme for instance. Her practice is a meditation; intrinsic and organic. But it is also graphic: she sees things the way she sees them; in black and white or in colour. Colour, whether high-keyed and vibrant or soft and subtle, dominates her choice. She is preoccupied with finding a sense of balance and harmony. Stephanie is a purist: When she produces a series with a wide angle, she does not switch lenses halfway through. And when she does, it is to shoot a whole new series. Using logic she creates her own pictorial language, injecting her own sensibility into our perception of the image —thereby imbuing it with pictorial meaning. ​ For Stephanie Desvaux, BORDERLINE is the space in-between, the space on the edge; front and back, up and down. She is able to observe these spaces and capture them. Through her contemplative eyes she pre- sents culture and melange in a state of semi consciousness. Inspired by Jessica Backhaus and Saul Leiter, she sees the world as disfigured, sometimes straightening it, almost apologetic to have done so. Stephanie is on the “borderline” of emotions and her subjects. Her works are as beautifully rendered as any painter’s canvas and as skilfully constructed as any graphic artist’s compositions.