"The inconsistency of an entity and fantasy of a myth."
Artist: Chochana Rosso
Project: The Suns Burns
"The Sun gives birth and devours its children.
As a mystical entity, it is the creator of the universe, the center of the world and the heart of humans. Through the solar cycle, birth, burning and new beginning, this entity unfolds in a temporality. A trinity endowed with a spiritual coherence and symbolism that Chochana uses as architecture to build this work about love. The photographic object is reflected in the Sun, and she tells the story of their unstable relationship that feeds the fantasy of an almost mystical desire. She makes us discover her sun, an entity related to intimacy and secret love, like a house constantly broken and rebuilt with deformities.
She tries to capture this entity in her obsessive photographic practice, and she struggles to maintain this distant connection that burns her when she seizes it. It is the story of a bond that is born in distance, creating desire and fantasy, then becoming toxic but essential that Chochana interprets with mythology and spiritualism."
"This visual diary is focused on an external photographic subject but refers to the artist and her unspeakable feelings. Through her images, she tells a story and testifies to her love and fascination for the photographed object. Her meeting with Alexander, five years ago, provoked a photographic “love at first sight” in the artist. Met during a photography workshop in Venice, he represented the myth of the young artist, an inaccessible Adonis, and a source of enriching intellectual exchanges. He will become an inspiration and a male presence in the long term, missing from the artist’s life. The series tells of this fascination with Alexander, the changes in this intense relationship, which intensifies and solidifies over time.
The writer and photographer Hervé Guibert greatly inspires Chochana, particularly in her search for intimacy and absence. In this work, she pays homage to the photograph “L’ami” from 1979, which Hervé Guibert took of his friend and lover, Thierry. The photographer’s hand placed on the other’s chest allegorizes their bond. While for Guibert, the location of this hand also reveals the complex of his hollow torso, for Chochana it is a sensual gesture and particularly unusual due to her lack of tactile relationships with men. In “Ghost Image”, Hervé Guibert writes: “by taking the photo, I bind you to me if I want, I bring you into my life, I assimilate you a little, and you can’t do anything about it”. The images register his desire and his will to possess the object at the risk of becoming “private photographs”. Roland Barthes uses this term when he talks about the becoming of photography in 1977: a photo “that takes charge of a love relationship with someone who has all its strength only if there has been a bond of love, even virtual, with the person represented. This is played out around love and death.”
Light structures the chronology of the story: dawn speaks of the encounter and the birth of desire, the zenith represents blindness and burning, then dusk announces the contentment of feelings. It is a master trinity that gives spiritual and symbolic coherence to an architecture made of light. This coherence represents the constant routing and change of emotions. The solar star imposed itself naturally on the artist. It is first of all an ambivalent entity by its necessity to create life but also its power of destruction. In addition, the link between the artist and his subject was formed around writing by light. The helio-structure with the solar cycle offers a trinity of times and states crucial for this chronological work. The sun is transformed into an entity full of contradictions that has an impact on its environment. The photographer undergoes the effects of the sun, or of the photographic object, and the images reflect her states and emotions."
© Chochana Rosso