Gabrielle Le Bayon, Portraits From the Back (2010)

Medium: Video Painting, Projection, Color and no sound

Dimensions: 9 Scapes | Duration: 56 min., 20 sec.

Collection: Video Painting Solo Series

Edition of 7

Reference: VPSS-GLPB10

Portraits from the Back is a series of video paintings each showing a figure standing or sitting in the foreground, with their back to the camera and looking at distant landscapes. Through the repetition of this visual structure, the emphasis is given to the diversity of environments experienced in the everyday: On-the-way landscapes, which can be perceived as the embodiment of human emotion. The front of these subjects is invisible; hence it is the landscape that embodies their face.

This series is inspired by the pictorial element in the background of Renaissance portrait paintings, which is a window opening onto a pastoral or architectural landscape. They evoke the mind of the subject or the thought of the painter. Portraits from the back explores the possibilities of poetics enclosed in the modern image of the human figure in geographically and emotionally intimate environments.

Gabrielle Le Bayon is a French artist, who works between London and Paris. Her practice focuses on video work, both in single channel and installation form. This medium enables her to investigate the limits of cinema and fine arts, fiction and documentary, blurring the lines between these different practices. She uses her personal experience to explore the aesthetic relationship between history, mythology, memory, and space. She graduated in 2012 with a Masters in Photography from the Royal College of Art, London. In 2011 was selected for a residency at the School of Visual Art in New York. She has exhibited work internationally including: Platoon Kunsthalle, Berlin (2013), Institut of Contemporary Art, London (2012), Museo de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires (2012); Model, AiOP, New York, (2012); Hotshoe Gallery, London (2012); Aesthetica Short Film Festival, York (2011), Twelve Around One gallery, London (2011); Pulse Miami, USA (2010); Vitrine Gallery, London (2010).

Gabrielle Le Bayon’s video work is held in collections by, the Institute of Art and Ideas, International Asset Management and various private collectors in the UK and France.