The human condition is corporeal, the flavor of the world is at such a price. Thought has its roots in flesh, just as flesh is an implemented thought. The intelligence of the body reminds us that the mind is not enclosed in a privileged segment of man but is inseparably embodied within it. The nagging interrogation of self entails granting a place to the body, looking at one’s hands or face while questioning one’s identity. But man never escapes the flesh ; for better or for worse, he is endebted to it for his movements, his words, his sensorial perceptions, his thoughts, or simply his
encounter with the other. Such is the power of these nudes photographed by Stéphane Chavanis that they clash with the usual norms of seduction and portray bodies which are simultaneously heavy and tranquil, abandoned, lacking in seduction because lacking in the desire to seduce. Their faces stare at us, we feel expectation, but no certainty that something will arrive to fulfill it. This is not desire. These naked women are in anything but a position to welcome the other, even if, paradoxically, their suspended and unaccustomed movement is directed at another. They are performing, bearing witness not to a pause, but to a questioning waitfulness. Nudity is tolerable when neutralized by a code and confined in a place (an erotic magazine for example); otherwise, the uneasiness it creates ends up highlighting the social values they disrupt, transforming the viewer into a voyeur. These nude images convey scarcely any eroticism, or rather they leave it suspended. No invitation is sensed, no smile renders them attractive; these women are disquieting, nothing in their attitude conveys a welcome to the eye gazing at them. Sensuality is no doubt present, but by default.

The break with institutionalized beauty, the beauty in which the whole of society recognizes itself, took place a long time ago already in modern art, at least as early as the “Demoiselles d’Avignon” by Picasso. The preponderance of flesh is already present in Bacon and others. Ethnology reminds us, moreover, that beauty and ugliness are arbitrary values varying with different human societies and the era in which they took root in place.. Far from conveying objective data about ugliness or indifference, the women presented by Stéphane Chavanis refer to a sample of humanity where desire and its absence both have a role, alongside weariness and boredom. Are they beautiful or ugly? The answer is the affair of each one of us, beyond the brutality of the question posed by the images. But the answer often belies the question, as Maurice Blanchot
put it so neatly. One has to know, therefore, how to leave the question in suspense, allowing it to pursue its work of undermining the fabric of our certainties.

These women are bodies only in a particular perspective which turns the viewer into a disappointed voyeur or a judge. The risk is, of course, that if he expresses his discomfort or disgust, he might be asked what appearance he offers to the world as far as beauty or ugliness are concerned, especially if he is naked. I imagine that our judge would reply with the voice of outraged innocence that he would never lower himself so far as to pose in the nude. But then, he is forgetting the image he shows to others in the intimacy of sex, for example, on beaches or elsewhere. Being naked is always a symbolic equivalent to being killed. It therefore requires to be recognized as an act of courage. The same thing goes for artists who expose themselves through the angle they choose to address their subject. Aesthetics are always ethics at work. Th voyeur takes no risk, apart from judging the other only from his appearance. But generally, he is spared any comments from others since he stands in the shadows, where courage has no place. Better then to say nothing and to see in those women a mirror of what we are.

It is a sign of the ambivalence of our contemporary societies that we display everywhere the bodies of top models, men or women, in which nobody can recognize themselves, sometimes not even those who posed for these images. The body is an incarnation of the enigma of presence, all the more so when the codes are broken down and the viewer cannot simply contemplate these beautiful creatures posing lasciviously with a smile which is an invitation to join them. And these women that Stéphane Chavanis’s camera parades before our eyes, their gaze suspended, await not a joy but a task to be fulfilled which disconcerts them more or less although they put on a brave face . They are moving because of what is left unsaid of their history, the quiet way in which each one, in her own style, plays with and appropriates the arm-chair prop ; they are touching because of what one imagines about them, their reasons for posing, and the sadness that can sometimes be detected in their face. The body is our condition. Stéphane Chavanis reminds us powerfully of man’s unbearable fragility, his derision and his grandeur, that supreme elegance of being at once everything and so little.

By opportunely placing a pregnant woman on the threshold of the gallery of portraits he submits to us, he also tells us that we come from a woman’s body and subordinates our visit to this inaugural image. The deliberate discontinuity with the last shot works upon as in the manner of the vanities of Renaissance painting. Memento mori. Remember you are going to die. The existence of each human being is that progression from one mood to another, from one body to another, and by reminding us of the polyphony of life, the laying bare of the countless pitfalls which disguise the ambivalence of the world. Those asperities that we do not wish to see, Chavanis imposes them upon our gaze and our sensitivity. “He who comes into the world to trouble nothing deserves no respect”, said René Char. How is it the flesh is a border within ourselves? The answer lies always between these two extremes: “The frightful limitation of the human body” answers Kafka; “The solemn geography of the body”, responds Eluard.