Artistic approach
As a student, Letizia Le Fur developed an interest in the history of art and the use of light and colour. Today, she brings colour into play in small strokes, like a painter with a palette, isolating and transforming, correcting and adding, celebrating and magnifying each hue to transcend reality and create the impression of a world floating between fantasy and dreams. Unexpected, absolute, sometimes secretive and ever opposed to all things ugly and inappropriate, her quest for harmony and beauty liberates her technique and distances her from conventions.
For Chaumont-Photo-sur-Loire, Letizia Le Fur is presenting a collection of images from a very special series produced on the island of Tahiti, in which she experimented with the erasure of colour. Photographs filled with sometimes oppressive vegetation are stripped of their glowing colours to create otherworldly landscapes. The turquoise of the lagoon, the green of the luxuriant forest, the red of the hibiscus… simply disappear. “Like in all my projects, I began by carefully harmonising the colours, then I faded out each hue to create works with no white or black but as rich a range of greys as possible.”
The single letter that differs between “decolonisation” and the title of the series, Décolorisation (2022-2023) points to the artist’s “process of visual and conceptual deconstruction”. Her monochrome works offer up an irreal beauty of almost unrecognisable locations. Stripped of its radiance, Tahiti is presented as though through a haze of deep slumber. “This chromatic metaphor reflects the difficulty of keeping local culture and identity alive in annexed territories. The project also explores the challenges of representing beauty and fantasies of distant lands. Often idealised as a land of exoticism and splendour, here Tahiti is swathed in a strange tropical torpor, as though suspended in time. Each photograph evokes a lost paradise in which the muted atmosphere of a fading world may no doubt remind us of a hazy past that we try to forget.”
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Letizia Le Fur is represented by Galerie Julie Caredda, Paris.
