THE MALEVOLENT EYE

Handmade Book + Leather Embossed Box
Laminated Digital C Type Prints
54 Pages
Forwarding Essay - Christian Caujolle
English Translation - Paul Muse
Edition of 15 + 1 AP

Excerpt from the introductory essay by Christian Caujolle

From the very beginnings of the medium, photographers have developed stratagems: ways and means of playing that enable reality and fiction to mix. They have lead those who look to believe in what they see; forgetting that it is an image and, moreover, giving the impression that the image, however improbable it may be, is much more credible than the real.

It is by playing in this complex and subtle way, not telling the truth without really lying, that Rachel Louise Brown draws us into a world that is strictly her own. It is offered to us not as fiction but as reality, both strange and marvelous, remaining enigmatic: the materiality of her dreams.

Having the upper hand, she has before all else decides on the lighting. Which she works on with a pleasure that is sensitive, sensual and nourished by reminiscences of cinematography, accentuated further by the choice of night. Here it is a question of fixed images and of a dialogue between them, rather than the editing and unfolding of a plot. The photographer has not decided on the place any more than she has chosen the actors, found by chance through small ads placed online and in newspapers. She has asked them to decide where they would like to pose for her but as it is she who does the framing, this is for them an illusion of freedom: an additional illusion in this trompe l’œil realm, whose palette redraws the world.

At once a film-maker and director, the artist becomes a kind of demiurge, wielding absolute power. And this power is made all the more unsettling by how she makes it possible to create a world by giving a new twist to the one that existed before: elevating it to the level of the sublime by transforming it into an image.

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