Isabelle Giovacchini

For more than fifteen years, Isabelle Giovacchini has been carrying out experimental work on the image. A singular figure in French photography, she has developed an empirical and intuitive approach to this medium, based on the manipulation of documents discovered through her research in archives, her readings or by chance. She seeks to alter the photographic medium, then to fix her experiments to a limit, just before the images disappear. Her vocabulary is that of the fragment, the imprint and the spectral. Her research is often rooted in the heritage and resources of the Mediterranean region, where she is originally from. She regularly leaves the realm of the image to work in the form of installations, projections or discrete interventions in the landscape.

For the serie Vif-argent, initiated in 2022, Isabelle Giovacchini scans old mirrors, sometimes precious and centuries old, other times modest or fragile, all gleaned over time and from encounters. She prints the images obtained in a silver laboratory on a very shiny paper, with a rendering close to Cibachrome.

The untouched areas of the tint are translated into black by the scanner, dazzled by its own reflection. The areas that are pitted produce a set of shapes, spots and accidents that each viewer is free to interpret in his or her own way; so many worlds that translate, in the manner of portraits or abstract landscapes, the life line of each of the mirrors.