© Gaëlle Cueff | Ton visage comme un paysage #4
Layers of expression
Gaëlle Cueff
Gaëlle Cueff uses various techniques like paintings and collages.
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Artdoc
Photographs can get a second life, embedded in an artistic context, away from their original destination, but still intrinsically connected to it. Gaëlle Cueff uses various techniques like paintings, collages, and layering of images, all mixed with original photographs, mostly found but also taken by herself. “I don't consider myself a photographer. The photographs are the starting point for my work, after which I mix them with other techniques and materials. What interests me is adding my experience and feelings to it.”
Gaëlle Cueff has always been interested in the physicality of natural materials. As a child, she admired the bones of a dead bird. As an artist, she needs the manual labour associated with producing artwork instead of ephemeral and immaterial digital photography. The formation at her job in the famous art museum Musée d'Orsay in Paris, where she worked with old photographs, also contributed to her interest in the substance of artworks.
The mixed bag of techniques is varied. For several works, Cueff uses encaustic or hot wax painting, an ancient technique that involves heated wax mixed with coloured pigments. It was already used by the Romans and even Egyptians, but also by the artist Kandinsky. Another technique is the collage, done with cut-out illustrations of magazines that are digitally scanned later. The surrealist collages are embedded with associations with French chansons. Cueff also paints on the photos with different techniques. The digital part only consists of scanning the originals and printing them on fine art paper. Photoshop does not play any role in this process.
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Tribute to death
A unique way of showcasing her work is through the series Genius Loci. The old portraits of unknown people of the past are placed in illuminated boxes. Before the photograph, the artist puts various layers of Plexiglas on which she painted and glued different objects. You look 'through a glass darkly' at the partly faint and obscured photographs of anonymous people, most of them found on a flea market in Shanghai during her artist residency. The depth of the boxes gives a mysterious aspect as if you look through layers of history into the lives of unknown people. “It is a kind of tribute but also an expressive element. These photos are neutral, and I add an expression to them by adding distinct elements over the picture. I glue the cicadas onto the glass or use oil painting on it. The cicadas are a symbol of resurrection and eternal life. The symbolism has nothing to do with Christianity; I am more interested in African Art and fetishist figures.”
In the series Mémoire des Autres, Cueff uses the painting technique over the original picture. In the photo Au milieu des algues et des coraux, we see images of red-coloured trees over an old ferrotype photo of two 19th-century ladies. The pictures of the trees first got red colour and were later superimposed. The trees appear to be symbols of family trees, and the colour red seems to symbolise the bloodlines of the pedigree. “This is about time and family roots. When we see the old family photo from the 19th century, we know nothing about them. I imagine them to be two sisters. I like their expression of ambiguity.”
The analogue technique is laborious and complicated but renders images that could never have been done digitally. “I make a scan of the ferrotype and print it, then I print a second layer of the trees on Plexiglas and mix it with ink and paint. Altogether, there are three or more layers. Afterward, I scan the final result and print it on a digital inkjet Hahnemühle fine art paper in a limited edition. This way, the initial analogue product is used mainly as the production model.”
Vibration of the wood
Once walking in the woods in Normandy, Gaëlle Cueff started taking photos of the trees with the iPhone, which she later continued in Italy and the south of France. Cueff wanted to record and translate the vibrations of the trees, but single photographs wouldn’t be strong enough to yield this sensation. On transparent materials, she superimposed layers of different shots of the trees and added layers with painted colours, after which she scanned the final results. “I print the first layer on photographic paper and the others on transparent paper with various capacities and colours. It gives the impression of three-dimensionality.”
The manual and analogue way of working produces unpredictable results, which is not a flaw but the charm of the process. “You have surprises when you make several trials because you change the colours and the mix of colours in various layers. So, you change and try again, which has a funny side to it, funnier than doing it with Photoshop.”
Andy Warhol
In one series, Ton visage comme un paysage, translated as, Your face as a landscape, the artist refers to the screen prints of Andy Warhol. The portraits, in this case, are not of a famous actor but of unknown Chinese citizens. They form a collage of six faces, instead of the Warholian four pictures, where the first is the original sepia-toned found photograph and the following five coloured copies of it. The first photo is an anonymous, inexpressive, rigid, neutral, passport-like picture; the others reveal various expressions made by superimposing layers of different shots with colours on those of drawings of birds, feathers, shells, and leaves. The faces become landscapes with mixed memories. “What interested me was giving neutral photographs some expressions. It is perhaps a kind of memory of the 'Kuleshov effect'—a Russian experience about montage in film, which shows that if you put images in a sequence, they influence the spectator, making him think a neutral face has all kinds of expressions. I wanted to show that neutrality does not exist and to give life to inexpressive pictures from the epoch when you needed to stay still in front of the camera. Neutrality can be affected by colours and elements you put around.”
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