TRAINING
ARTISTIC ITINERARY
My initial training is a Bachelor’s degree in cinema at the University of Paris 3. Among the modules I studied art history, photography, and attended a silver printing workshop.
During these years as a student, I was a VJ (on the model of DJs, but on video). Veejaying is mixing audio-visual samples and graphic creations, live sets at concerts or performances… and it gave me the opportunity to learn on the job some solid editing basics.
Since 2004 I have been a film editor, with two main facets, assisting on feature films and editing animated shorts. I also work on documentaries and series for television.
In the plastic arts, I am self-taught, years of practice as an amateur, a lot of experimentation, and since my professionalization in 2014, continuing education. (Modules of Fine Arts with a colourful spirit and photography courses at the Gobelins school).
I have a taste for creative disciplines that I nurture through regular workshops, and a chromatic direction through any medium approached. Blue.
Sky, navy or night. Cerulean Turquoise Indigo Phtalo Ultramarine Cobalt… fairy-tale words or simply Azur, which has become my nickname Azul.
An attraction no doubt initiated by the landscapes of childhood -birth in the Alps, families at the foot of the Vosges, youth in Brittany- and linked to a spiritual dimension of nature, powerful vitality. The colour chart of infinity is engraved in my eyes, I see life in blue.
In 2012, in Chile, an initiation to alternative photo prints was a decisive step: hypnotized by the blue of the cyanotype, I wanted to know the whole process and master it. I went to Santiago for an intensive training course with Catalina DE LA CRUZ. This artist works painting, photography, sculpture… sometimes together. She taught me the technical basics and encouraged me to explore the cyanotype, beyond the photo print.
Very quickly I used the photosensitive emulsion as a painting and rediscovered a discipline, cyanography, which has existed for more than a century. A puzzle piece that gives meaning to all my artistic hobbies, like a long preparation for a serious game, blue magic.
Cyanography revealed my expressive abilities, I saw the way to formulate my poetry, to implement wonder, to play with sparks. Everything appears to me as a sensitive ingredient – collected objects that will leave their imprints, photographs that will be processed, thanks to movement.
My first artistic orientation was to play with the polysemy of the works, mixing ingredients, ideas, and of course techniques.
Halfway between photography and painting, the cyanographies intrigue, the monochrome calls out.
These perceptive fantasies induce other visions and during the first exhibitions, I understood that I had to watch the titles and information of the works in order to give individual imaginations a chance.
Since 2014 cyanography has become my second profession, as a visual artist.
with international exhibitions and sales, followed by a workshop, residencies and educational activities. I have set up my practice in better conditions and am trying to make inroads into other media, in volume and even in action through performances.
The works are always of an ostentatious blue, and often revolve around an equally visible axis, abstract figuration. This aesthetic research underpins my work, subtracting the ingredients from their representation. I inscribe it in the lineage of the Pictorialists, these photographers at the beginning of the 20th century affirmed the artistic value of their medium, in particular by the manual alteration of the image and the transcription of sensations.
APPROACH
AZUL LOEVE
Detailing the universe, the clouds, the tango
Hijacking clichés, representations of use
Brushstrokes that reveal fragments of the world,
all in blue and white, in texture
Playing with light-sensitive emulsion
Shaping light footprints
Even within the figurative or the shooting
The traces, irregularities, stains from the cyanography…
involve a different level of perception
These marks contaminate the image
give it an organic appearance
This corporeality becomes image itself.
Giving a graphic form to my gaze and my poetry
Beyond personal visions
I’m working on the evocative power of cyanography…
again the emptiness, the blue, their expressive intensities…
Abstract or seemingly abstract images
Invoking the Imagination
