LEA BELOOUSSOVITCH - PERP WALK

Léa Belooussovitch (born 1989, Paris) lives and works in Brussels. In 2014, she received a master’s degree in drawing from ENSAV La Cambre and was awarded the Prix MOONENS. In 2017 she received the COCOF Médiatine prize and in 2018 her work was again recognised, this time with the prize awarded by the Federation Wallonia-Brussels Parliament. Léa Belooussovitch is represented in France by the Paris-Beijing Gallery (Paris).

At the Botanique, Léa Belooussovitch presents Perp Walk, a project inspired by the ritual of the same name that goes back to the early days of court photography. ‘Perp walk’ refers to the act of capturing the image of the criminal leaving the court. Prepared in advance, anticipated and staged, the perp walk has virtually become a photographic style, accusatory in nature. Faces hide, from shame but also in order to avoid the accusations of photography, in order not to unveil the face.

The Perp Walk exhibition at the Botanique takes the form of pieces of velvet fabric in large formats, onto which are printed photographs which the artist has reframed. These were originally shots of people forced into the perp walk, reframed with a close focus on what is still visible of the faces, presenting them in a more intimate fashion, isolated from the absent, stress-inducing off-camera environment exercising pressure on them.

The photographic staging created around an individual is also the point of departure for the artist’s new drawings on felt, presented in the form of a triptych. Created using coloured pencils on felt, the drawings are based on a press photograph that has irrupted into the personal space of a vulnerable person, a victim whose pain is captured in a very brief instant. Through the blurred treatment and the choice of three different angles of view on the same event, the relationship to the subject is distanced, achieving a certain anonymity, by comparison with the photographs organised and taken under constraint.

The third focus of the exhibition consists of a large-format video projected in a dark room, presenting a series of reframed shots slowed down to an extreme degree at the instant of a flash from a camera during a perp walk. Pixelised images that perpetuate the moment of shame and the speed of the light, in a soundless sequence.

To move from the pixel to pigment, from the pixel to textile fibres, is to dematerialise the image to the point of its partial loss and to give it a corporality that it does not possess. The unwoven felt fibre links, like the theatrical appearance of the velvet, lend the image a strength, a formal density and a structure which enable it to exist in a space.

The works offer a moment of stillness, a suspension of the dramatic image which becomes a kind of screen, a filter that holds back the raw violence and across which the emotions pass.