Delayed lyricism
Through photography, Dorothée Wycart seeks to get as close as possible to the essence of things and of being. The female body is immersed in the middle of aquatic, mineral and vegetal elements to suggest a vital energy and a form of ecstasy. The photograph remains a « ut pictura poesis » but under a particular register: that of an interior landscape delivered by the seizure of the world. The work is thus a lesson of life more than a lesson of thing.
The photographer mixes the rough with the smooth, the surface with the depth in an impressionist rigor. The disparate more than sketched signifies the claim to wonder without which life is only a programmed suicide. Since everything ends, the only possible recourse is the injunction of the imperative « Come » which shatters the quiet continuity of photographic discourse.
Neither iconoclast, nor conservative, Dorothée Wycart is in the line of the essentialists. For her – more than the solidity of materiality – the fullness of the affect allows to fill the existence so that the inside feeds the outside and not the opposite. Photography no longer aims at the coagulation of fantasies but at the metamorphosis of the world by the gigantic power of existence. It is therefore appropriate to enter into the nudity of the work. The catches are less figures than substances within an asceticism that accepts eros according to a particular lyrical density since atonal. Indeed the image does not « sing » any more, it makes better by leaving the magma for the assumption of the being in an intimacy of the emotion. In this sense photography becomes enchantment but paradoxically in its closest relationship, the most « trivial » with the elementary which alone makes the real truth of the being.
Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret
Dorothée Wycart 