L’épreuve du réel
Chapitre 1 : La photographie à l’épreuve de la colorisation
Exhibition from September 11 to October 18, 2025
–
Galerie VU’
60 avenue de Saxe, Paris 15
Open Thursday to Saturday from 2 pm to 6 pm
When AI-generated images continuously project us into bewildering simulations of reality, Galerie VU’ begins a cycle of exhibitions showcasing photographic images created by the natural intelligence of their authors — insatiable observers of the real.
While photographic imagery is intrinsically tied to reality through its very process, in direct connection with the tangible world, it has always sought to reinvent, rewrite, or transcend the real objects it captures. A sense of unreality.
This first chapter explores the reinterpretation of reality through the colorization of photographic prints. It brings together works by Ouka Leele, Israel Ariño and Clara Gassull, Rima Samman, and Irène Jonas.
For each of these artists, colorization is applied with unique methods and intentions. Spanish artist Ouka Leele, in the heart of the Movida Madrileña, gave free rein to her unbridled creativity by hand-coloring her prints with watercolor, transforming reality into a dimension full of fantasy and deliberately assumed kitsch. Israel Ariño entrusts his analog images, taken in Picardy, to Catalan artist Clara Gassull, who works on them using a digital palette of eight colors. Together, they reinterpret the landscape, subtly re-enchanting the territory. Rima Samman works with archival images, whether from her family or the press. Through color, she revives the past, reactivates it, questions memory, and brings new life and meaning to remembrance. Irène Jonas presents seaside landscapes in three-part sequences. Her oil-painted enhancements on black-and-white prints disturb the very materiality of the images and the elements, creating a kind of vertigo between the intensity of the elements and the slowness of the process.
Through added color, photography is never a tautological representation of the reality from which it originates. The artists’ interventions reveal unsettling aspects of the world that our distracted gaze might not have dared to perceive.
Israel Ariño & Clara Gassull
Irène Jonas
Ouka Leele
Rima Samman
—
—
