“Poésie Noire” (2015-2020)

In Poésie Noire, Anthony Mirial explores the fragile boundary between flesh and painting, life and memory, light and oblivion.

During his travels through museums around the world, he photographs masterful paintings, fragments of works from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, extracting shards of pictorial matter, breaths of the soul. These fragments are then reassembled onto the bodies of nude women, photographed under the harsh glow of neon light, in parking lots or empty studios.

This act of recomposition gives rise to hybrid figures, both human and painting, where art history merges with contemporary flesh. Each image becomes an alchemical rebirth, a visual poem woven from shadows, flowers, and dust.

The artist fragments, assembles, resurrects, like a 21st-century Giuseppe Arcimboldo, he composes faces and bodies from thousands of pieces of old paintings, as if the memory of the past were seeking to take form again through the skin of the present.

In these nocturnal portraits, beauty is crossed by the specter of time. Poésie Noire is not a tribute to classicism: it is its metamorphosis, its luminous ghost.