INNER by Rose Vidal

Velvet lips, corduroy. The socks are rolled-down, the shirt is rolled-up. Breasts upside down, the back is laying on the sheets, the belly tight, under the waistband. Tied-up top, bra and necklace fasteners.

Further, closer. Skin grain, film grain, beauty spot. As red as the leather mini-shorts are, these lips, these spots on the skin. You can get closer and closer. Details: skin, colours, freckles. Details of fabrics, of jeans, of shirts, of underwear. Kinks in the textile, crooks of the limbs. Bending limbs. Details, details, they accumulate and aggregate and make you realize – here and there it is the same body, the same light bathing this very body, the same soft atmosphere. The same person whose presence you grasp through glimpses, and bits of her face, eyes, lips, mouth. You only get to catch pieces of her – she’s a she –, you feel close, too close to enjoy the full picture. How close should you get to someone whose bigger, fuller picture you aren’t familiar with?

Deeper. Look closely. Who are you looking at? Or are you merely intruding on what you oughtn’t to? Pictures of women, of their nakedness, bodies in pieces, close-up shots, there are so many, so many obsessions, too many visions. More than you can handle, how many naked bodies, how many pieces of women have you looked at, can you escape these pictures now, can you see in between all of them, can you still see, another way, elsewhere, behind, can you see through and beyond?

Over and over. And over again. Can you look at this woman, sunbathed and half naked, her eyes closed as if she didn’t even know you were there to watch her, can you look at her without wondering if your gaze on her isn’t another screen blurring who she is, hardly allowing you to get a hold of what she is, body parts, obsessive fragmentation, intrusive close-ups?

And over again. You stop doubting. Inner: as you go over the cotton T-shirts, the laces of her shoes, the soft wrinkles of her skin from one captured gesture to another, her belly, her neck and breasts at a grazing angle, however, you quietly let go of your scruples.

She is not just another fragmented body: she overflows and overwhelms images. She is not blurred; she is blurring, for she is sensually wed with the ambient light and wed with the surrounding colours. Painters know that it takes blue and green and cold shades as much as red and flesh and warm tones to render a vivid skin tone. Her skin is a very large-spectrum chromatic palette echoing and enlightening her close world. The sun loves her and is longing for her.

She is not helpless, she is at rest there, she is at ease.

Her closed eyes do not signal her vulnerability to your eyes. She has already acknowledged your eyes on her, not ignored, not endured, not merely tolerated nor accepted, but welcomed. Under your eyes, she accomplishes those everyday gestures, over and over. Dressing, undressing, running her hand over her face, tucking her shirts, holding her ribs gently. Moaning sleepily and languorously, maybe.

Inner, innermost. Those common, yet so private actions belong to the quietness of our personal spaces. They are what makes the spaces so personal, what brings objects to life and to our attention, as well as to use and misuse. They are the inner part of our interiors, the unseen of our private surroundings. The movement of the hand gathering socks, the same chaotic hand upsetting the lined, fumbling around fabrics or fixing stuff around.

Commotion within the flat, between the walls; settling like micro-particles of dust in a sunbeam, settling as the locked-in bodies are forced to discover time, to feel how long it can get, how bored one can get when left for days and weeks in their own home and their own mind. A very peculiar quietness spreads through the limbs and the mind at this point.

Step by step, from one day to the very similar next day, she lies in her shirt on the mattress, on the floor, or sits in her shorts on the same floor – here’s another day, here are other poses and other pants.

As time seems to stretch over the same days, in between the same inescapable walls that protect her and frame her up, she seems to reach a deeper level of quietness and life: as though her sensations, temperature and breath had found a delicate inner balance allowing her to settle in this repeated exposure. Is it the same light? not quite; the same season, the same time of day, or close? The same woman, the same peacefulness, the same way of lying in front of the camera, a clue that it’s the same eye behind the camera witnessing her presence over and over again.

It’s all close-ups, but each detail of her skin, in delicate harmony with the drape of the bed, of her clothes, with the shiny floor and her soft hair, each of these details contains the whole atmosphere, the whole home, and implies the photographer’s presence as well. It’s hidden and obvious at once: you would not be allowed to see those details if it wasn’t to the photographer’s delicate and accompanying, mediating presence, in front of which she rests. It takes the most special presence of a lover, a companion, watchful eye sharing her space, her light and the air she breathes, to vouch for her moments, her leisure, her gestures and her moods.

Her body in constantly renewed interaction with his eyes, as an everyday game between four walls. At home, the usual space, but they never go around in circles. Boredom is turned into leisure, monotony into languor. They are exploring, coupling a variety of settings with the many colour shades of her skin. Red clothing turned light pink once put on, transparent colours fading on her and highlighting her skin; shiny materials around, a steel chair, a bottle, the floor, bouncing colours off and around her.

The photographer and his model are collaborating and elaborating images, progressively adding colours in the series, inflecting the poses of the body, the angle, and the view. Out of the well-known, out of what’s at hand – your body and clothes, your everyday belongings – they build new places and unveil new horizons. The photographs make canvas and paintings out of the cotton, sheets and jeans, the framing turns the body into a figure dancing from the tip of her fingers to the corner of her lips.

This indoors occupation is a ritual, a rehearsal for the unexpected, allowing Vincent Ferrane to build memories of intimacy: images drawn from the inside, from what often remains hidden – the immeasurable temporality of their own privacy, in which they spent so much time together, more significantly than in their home. Those captured moments have allowed new interstitial spaces to exist and be explored then. Desires, leisure, pleasure. As you are now going through Vincent’s images, images of Armelle: Inner is as light as it is heavy, as essential as it is trivial. Small things, and time, and love. It’s there, inside and beyond, contained and infinite: shots of the innermost inside.

Rose Vidal

INNER published by Art Paper Edition

22,5 × 32,5 cm, 48 p, ills colour, hardcover
ISBN 9789493146945
design and editing: Jurgen Maelfeyt

Edition of 750
September 2022