THE INHABITANTS
13 UNIQUE PIECES / PHOTOGRAPHIC PRINT WITH HANDMADE PAINTING
Inkjet print on Hahnemühle Fine Art Paper / 75X75cm / 2016 – 2017
Starting with the timeless genre of portrait, Elene Usdin disrupts it by directly painting on the photographic print.
And she paints the emotions, hidden behind the calm look of her teenage models.
The artist questions a certain idea of photography which defines a photograph by its reproducibility. Her photographs from Les Habitants have become unique pieces : Elene Usdin paints chimerical costumes on her photographed models, in a phantasmagoric dialogue with the history of art (250 hours to illuminate each portrait).
As they are captured at the fragile age of adolescence, that brief but intense passage from childhood to adulthood,
girls and boys come to express an inner chaos through their painted ornaments : tiny imaginary characters, witches
and demons, overflowing vegetation and carnivorous plants, a disturbing and visionary echo to the inhabited spirits
of the teenagers.
Although these paintings come with a cultural heritage, which forms and educates us, they metamorphose into a wild adornment for these young people with the emotion and violence the artists of the past
