Éric du Bellay

ÉRIC DU BELLAY (Chatenay Malabry, France, 1980).
"L'Abandon (The Surrender) "Corps Vibrants Project, 2020
Digital print on Hahnemühle FineArt Extra Mat Lab paper.
Attached certificate issued by the author.
Slight marks on the paper.
Signed, dated and located (Paris) on the back.
Measurements: 27 x 40 cm; 30 x 43 cm (frame).
This session of the Corps Vibrants series is one of those moments in which the creative process seems to develop with an almost unexpected spontaneity. It involved Anna, an actress, and Vladimir, a dancer at the Opéra de Paris, protagonists of an encounter that would mark the beginning of the project. At that time the artist had not yet fully defined the direction the series would take, and the very development of the session gradually revealed the intensity of the bodily dialogue between the models. Although they barely knew each other, from the very first moment they both engaged in a dynamic of trust and openness that generated a particularly powerful connection, resulting in a session imbued with a profound human sensibility, where the presence and interaction of the bodies became the true core of the image. In this context, it is inevitable to evoke Marina Abramović's celebrated work The Artist is Present, as the scene captured shares that same notion of absolute presence: two artists, a man and a woman, fully focused on the shared instant.
Éric du Bellay took up photography at the age of fifteen, developing his black and white images himself. From the beginning, his work focused on faces and bodies, as if seeking to preserve the trace of the living. He then temporarily abandoned photography to pursue a career as a filmmaker. He made six short films in France and Iceland and his first feature film, Menina Casilda, was shot in Madrid in 2021. In 2019 he returned to photography with his project Corps Vibrants, a series of nudes shot in studio in Paris. This was followed by his second project, Libertad, started in Madrid in 2021 as a response to the restrictions resulting from the pandemic. Influenced by the works of Marina Abramović, Ren Hang and Ryan McGinley, his work explores representations of the naked body in movement, situating himself in a territory where performance, photography and the exploration of contemporary corporeality converge.