'Permutation': The Starkly Real Nude Photography of Fabrice Bigot (2019)

 

We are living in a period where any deviation from the prescribed narrative creates great anxiety within the mainstream. There is an ever-narrowing of options as to what is ‘acceptable’ and what is rejected. It is a period where comedians are censured for telling jokes which are not politically-correct; a period where great artists from history are now routinely scorned for supposed faults in their personality, or, worse, for merely having acted within the accepted moral code of their own (now unacceptable) era. Paradoxically, in a world where the Internet should be instrumental in fomenting limitless freedom and creative growth across the planet, a creeping shallowness seems to be in train. This is a period where we are expected to conform to restrictive viewpoints and opinions, to click ‘Like’ to the same encouraging thoughts. And this is as true of images as it is for opinions. Over the past two-decades the phenomenon of the ‘selfie’ has reached saturation point.

Trillions of selfies have now been snapped, but their point seems to be to conform to a received ideal of human ‘acceptability’ rather than to showcase a person’s individuality. Everyone in them begins to look the same, in a proscribed narcissistic, plastic ideal of what is ‘attractive’. Despite well-meaning efforts made by a noble few in western culture and commerce to promote alternative, and real, body-positive messages, the homogenised, standardised body shape continues to hold sway. The trim, gym-sculpted, six-packed, tanned, pumped, packed, and implanted version of the human body is of course directed by capitalism – which doesn’t appear to be challenged any time soon. Where does this leave the serious, fine-art photographer who wishes to depict the naked human figure, and to contribute to the great historical canon of photographic nudes, which have traditionally occurred free of the self-righteous restrictions of blinkered contemporary philosophy? It is against this unrelenting tide of uniformity and body-tyranny that photographer Fabrice Bigot presents his latest series, Permutations, (Mars Gallery, Windsor, 13th July – 3rd August, 2019).

 

Across thirteen images, the middle-aged female model in this series is isolated in limitless inky- blackness. She seems to float in space like a drifting, lost satellite. Her absolute reality provides stark contrast with the beautifully artificial representation of her pictorial situation. The images are timeless, frozen moments of pure humanity – unregulated by fashion, custom or taste. The figure could have been plucked as easily from today as from the Victorian era; the Renaissance; the Dark Ages; the Roman Empire, and beyond. And in that, she represents elementary, ur-humanity, before the restrictive, suffocating curtain screened off our understanding of ourselves as beautifully-flawed, wonderfully-imperfect, natural creatures. The female figure in Bigot’s photographs is starkly abstracted by light and deep shadow. Cool blue tones are softened by warm pinks, which appear, here and there, in joints, crevices, hips, spines – and which remind us that this is, after all, a flesh and blood creature that we are contemplating.

Refreshingly, in our current era of fascistic fetishisation of the proscribed, ‘ideal’, human body, the images are free of idealisation. They are stark, real, frank and honest. Bigot has also removed identifying features of the model (head, face) from our experience, and this serves to intensify our basic psychological identification with the images. They possess the same concentrated reality as ancient Greek or Roman sculptures – and they are as highly-charged with human truth.

Bigot has provided a useful quote to sum up this body of work. It is from the German artist, Hans Bellmer - who was no stranger to presenting the human figure in all its complexity, strangeness, vulnerability and eroticism:

The body is like a sentence that invites us to rearrange/dislocate it, so that its real meaning becomes clear through a series of endless anagrams. – Hans Bellmer.