Marysuecide
(The little death of the image)
If by photography we mean a captured instant, a stop motion, or a trace of the past, then Mary Sue's photography has nothing to do with the photographer.
It doesn't capture a single instant and never endeavours to prove that "such" reality has ever existed. Its aim is that of a picture generator ; it is the device that's designed to render visible what's surrounding and formatting its tool, its image, this Mary Sue, this mould.
It has nothing to do with the representation of reality, although...
In Mary Sue's photography, everything is calculated, sleek, and manipulated. Nothing move before, during and after the shoot. The image is dead beforehand. Nothing is left to chance in the framing, no surprise, no depth of field, everything sticks together : the literal image to its figurative sense, the content is glued to the form, but the image is nice and as reassuring as a lie.
The crucial stages of a fiction are always marked by intense moments. Thus, in the Mary Sue project, the character is systematically "committed to suicide" by its author at the end of each "chapter" which has staged it.
The first 7 Marysuecide produced in 2001 mark the beginning of a series that the artist has continued ever since, according to the adventures that make up all of his work.
These images, which can be taken as syntheses bringing together the stereotype that has just been scrutinized and the state of the character responsible for the codes that served the project, are the aesthetic result of all these excesses.
Thus presented as inert, served by the photographic medium and the immobility that characterizes it, Mary Sue offers a final image of herself, overdosed, jubilant. Worked like advertising still lifes, the Marysuecides are indigestible climaxes that are ending with the character and what it represents.
The crime (scene), perfectly composed, leaves no place for photographic chance.
The Marysuecide are also pictures of suicide that establish right from the start the principles of a game and a complete freedom of the author.
It's the radical way out that makes her a character of her own, the resort that allows her to assert the full possession of herself, no matter the position she's in ; a principle to distance herself out of hand, and even sometimes to have it off.
Marysuecide #1 to 7
Mary Sue, 2001
Marysuecide #8
(Un piètre Mondrian)
Endura photography
120x120 cm, 2003
Marysuecide #11
(The beach)
Endura on diasec, 120x120cm
2006
Marysuecide #14
(Bon pour un tir)
Endura on perforated diasec, 200x120cm
2009
Marysuecide #16 and #17
(She shoots horses, doesn't she?)
From the Mary Goes Round project
2009
Marysuecide #18
(Fan Service)
160x108cm, 2017