The rooms of love, 1984-1987
The Chambers of Love setting had been ready for quite a while, ever since The Last Supper photo (1981). I was ready for the alchemy of burning and emptiness. No sooner had the first photo been named: the Chamber of Love, than I understood I had “my subject” at hand, that everything else had been a mere picturesque detour, that I could stop there and invent such chambers by the thousands…
Romantic renouncement, sensuality of absence, lust in white, the soul, freed from all weights, hovering over the last traces of bodies… and at the same time, the traces of bodies that linger when all the rest is lost.
Winter rooms, Golden rooms, 1987-1989
In 1987, I went to Japan for the second time. I came back dizzy with the gold and Buddhist phantasmagoria. Quite naturally, the Chambers of Love to which I could not put an end, that had given rise to three or four Chambers in Winter, became Chambers of Gold. I revelled in the ambivalence of gold. Uncluttered, mystical spaces, where only the dazzle of the presence still dwells, the last material limit, the last visible surface before pure incandescence, before whiteness.