Approach

What is a body if not the means for a living being to express itself to the world?
What is a body if not an envelope that says something about us and which hears the world?

Stéphanie Kristofic has always been interested in the human body and its language. She seeks to capture its expressiveness, and to understand the dynamics between the body and the soul.

“A body at rest is nothing but flesh, but as soon as it starts moving it becomes the vehicle for something else. As soon as the entire body enters into motion, it is inhabited by the soul and the soul reveals itself through it.
What interests me about a body in motion is the manifestation of a truth that escapes me.
If human beings have a divine aspect, what we call the spark of life, then this divinity is incarnated by the manner in which it inhabits a body, gives it life and spurs it into motion.
Extended members, muscles under tension, the path of a gesture - all of these things reveal flesh inhabited by an intention, a desire, a spirit.
By wanting to seize the fleeting moment of a motion, I am trying to collect this piece of divinity.”

From all her canvases, over various series that have helped her progress in her questioning, she retains the feeling of frustration of an unachieved goal.

“Even when working from life, surrounding myself with dancers and live models, while I paint, standing up, with a spatula to keep myself in a dynamic, quick-moving state, my paintings can at most represent what I am seeking. That is why I wanted to create this short circuit, to create a real moment of life. To share these moments with the audience, and to engender the fruit of an instant meeting between the inhabited body of a dancer and mine. To materialise and make timeless a fleeting manifestation of this meeting. To express and show the emotion created by the fusion between my subject and me, at the moment the intention that inhabits me makes visible the body of another”.

The results of the happening, these impressions of bodies coated with paint, are filled with surprises and revelations.
In the tradition of Yves Klein’s anthropometries, the bodies leave an imprint. However, in this case, the trace is not one of a body, but rather a trace of life, a trace of energy, a trace of emotion and of intention.

“What best defines artists, is perhaps the fact that they are a little bit schizophrenic, since artists have various perceptions of the world that surrounds them: a conventional perception, the same as everyone else’s, but also a tinted or out-of-sync or more sensitive perception. It is as though one is looking at the world through a camera lens with the depth of field or focal point changed, or with coloured or distorting lenses. I continuously play with these perceptions, switching from one to the other. When I am in “artistic”, or what I would rather call “sensitive” mode, I don’t just see bodies in motion, I see fragmented bodies, stretched by axes, lines, and abstractions, and I feel the carnal power of the body even more.”

By using disequilibrium, Stéphanie Kristofic simply emphasizes the fleeting nature of the moment. A sequence of motion in disequilibrium is, by its very nature, something ephemeral, since to be still requires finding a point of equilibrium. This ephemeral side contributes to creating an elusive emotion and to feeling it as an almost supernatural manifestation. Something that occurs outside the rules of time, something inexpressible that appears.

This ombres chinoises staging is inspired by Plato’s cave. The spectator does not see the human beings (dancer, painter), but instead observes their manifestations on the screen which is the canvas.
Plato started with the principle that our view of the world is distorted, and that what we see is only a deceptive reflection of reality. And if, we assumed, on the contrary, that hiding bodies is in fact a way of emphasizing what there is to be seen, not the body as we see it every day, not an identifiable human being, but rather what emerges from it. The process would then make it possible to free ourselves of this identification so as only to allow the essence to be seen: what is manifested beyond the body.