Unlikely Pictures
At the crossroads of photography and painting, Ouka Leele’s work has no equivalent. The artist stages the world – objects or models – in compositions, still lifes or portraits, and then photographs it. Thus begins the creative process, with images that can each time be linked to a pictorial genre, largely nourished by an iconography close to classical or surrealist painting. One is already much more in the vision – dreamlike, burlesque or nightmarish – than in the effect of reality or the faithful painting: it is not the world that bursts into one’s lens, it is indeed the world that makes it spring, improbable and fanciful, from one’s imagination and then from one’s eye.
After this first step, she considers the photographic print as a drawing and a preparatory support: she paints it in watercolour. Ouka Leele impregnates her images with colours that transcend, upset and sublimate reality to put it at a distance and give it a new dimension. Sometimes her palette is adorned with tender colours, sometimes her screaming tones flirt with an assumed kitsch, the Movida period, that great cultural movement of the democratic transition in Spain. It captures the unleashing of freedom of a youth freed from the weight of convention and oppression after more than thirty-five years of Franco’s dictatorship.
It is clear that Ouka Leele has developed a language and a style of writing that belong to her alone. From her playful and inventive universe emerge an undeniable pictorial mastery and unbridled creativity. This leading figure of the Movida, National Photography Prize, has pursued a prolific and poetic work that never ceases to reinvent and re-enchant the world.
DETAILS
38 chromogenic vintage prints on Kodak paper, 90 x 120 cm
Galerie VU’, Paris, 2019
Galerie VU’, Paris, 2019
Galerie VU’, Paris, 2019
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