Nina Laisné

For the past few years, Nina Laisné has been creating a unique universe in which the image plays an important role. Working in both photography and film, the artist is not limited to one specific language of expression. In her meticulously constructed works, latency and a contemplative sense of time acquire their true meaning. In her first photographs, more than the actors that she directs with precision and the perfect decors, it’s the moment of grace of a suspended moment, this interstice full of incertitude that interests the artist. Already in these early works, she reveals signs of the work to come. Tinted with strangeness, her works take form and unfold in resonance with other mediums such as cinema and music, as well as historical and sociological elements: art, popular traditions, fashion, cabaret and opera. These more or less visible porosities with other disciplines as well as the importance of Hispanic culture in her work make Nina Laisné’s artistic research a rich and deliciously original mix, which defies classification. The artist, who is also a musician and cinema buff, builds her visual universe in this way with vocables drawn from the performing arts and film, creating dialogues with sound rather than with words. Her recent work also plays with cross-pollination and develops this shifting from one genre to another, from everyday reality to fiction and vice versa.

Émilie Flory, 2015
Translated by Patricia Chen