ILS

JÉRÔME SUSSIAU
photographs
December 11, 2021 – January 15, 2022

Jérôme Sussiau is a portraitist. In his images, the nude figures emerge with the radicalism imposed on them by his studio.
The men who contact him to be photographed follow each other modestly, in a long series of first encounters. The clothes and the spatial context have disappeared; only the essential remains, with which he composes to touch something masculine, without falling into the trap of a theatrical virility.

The skin, its spots and scars, the relaxed muscles or in tension are visible as they are rather than as we think we know them through traditional modes of representation. In Jérôme Sussiau’s photographs, no Greek gods carved in the blueprint of white marble nor rugby players frozen in the glossy paper of a calendar, but accessible bodies, tactile images.

At the heart of the exhibition, a series of manhoods shown to the public for the first time informs the photographer’s entire practice. An object of disgrace and taboo, often suggested but rarely shown, the male gender, captured frontally by the artist, offers a counterpoint that deconstructs common fantasies about what a man should be. These images, stripped of traditional, authoritarian or threatening phallic power, become through the gentleness of their capture a relevant reading grid for all of his portraits.