2

3

4

5

6

7

8

.9

ROUGE LEFEBVRE: A PASSION PLAY by John K. Grande
Packaging personalities, painting with photos, Rouge Lefebvre’s Les Nonnes series captures a lot of atmospheres, builds a tension using age-old conventions. By combining the traditional portrait as stage set for posterity with unconventional costumes, models whose faces are as pure as the driven snow, or women with presence, she builds a universal language we can all access that touches on contemporary life. She works from live models. The process of dressing them, make up, composing, all adds to the photo moment. The portrait image in these works exists against a background that is openly constructed, built as a two-dimensional stage with its own material contrasts, juxtapositions, and elements. These elements exist to heighten the “historicity” of the portrait image, a notion that exists outside time, no matter when it was painted or photographed. The portrait becomes a commodity, exchanged within a hierarchy of contexts, and the “historicity” Rouge Lefebvre gently directs us to is relative and continuous. As in all eras, whether Mediaeval or Baroque, or Neo-Classic or contemporary post-Pop, portraits are fictional truths. Rouge Lefebvre manipulates portraiture, the iconic image to achieve a value that infuses religious, sexual, and political hidden meanings into the art, as it always has and will in the future.
Her process involves the way the images are put together, the way they are compositionally set. Often the portraits are in spaces that are immediate and layered. The imagery itself becomes a form of packaging. There are shades of Romanticism, a Baroque capacity to embroider and decorate, to describe space using illusionary effects of lighting, and décor. These conventions of portraiture that go back to Ingres and Cranach, to name but two of art history’s pantheon of portraitists.
The use of light, of religious icons, all contribute to a dialogue on representation and what imagery as portraiture represents. Power becomes central to the stories that are told here. Rouge Lefebvre does this in a way that is seductive: from all of this combines purity, nostalgia, beauty, costume, tonality, to make a statement about women's inner power. She does so in a way that engages all of us, with a spirit of inquiry. She asks us all to look into what the portrait image represents… Isn’t every portrait a fiction? Does not every portrait tell a story of the subject, whether powerful, pedantic or youthful? Interestingly, she chooses people from her everyday, whatever their age or background, for their input as “found materials”, in an aesthetic of happenstance and organic creation. We know nothing of their history, or where they come from. Yet there is a fairytale aspect to her conception, to the playful paper costumes, make up and body painting, in her presentation of her subjects, and disguise and nature likewise play a role. As the lighting adapts and contains, these people become photo icons of today’s world where the image supersedes reality. These works are like paintings, through the medium is photographic. Elements are assembled, the clothing, the colour, the frontal or angular arrangements. As images they are tightly manicured, manufactured in scenes besieged by lighting, and carry a dramatic, even Romantic tension. One woman appears as if she were Pope, but locked into her fashion statement too.
Rouge Lefebvre’s art plays with sublimated desires now made explicit, and causes us to question what is sacred and what is not sacred, and why. It’s a passion play where art is as close to advertising as the old portraits once were, statements of social and cultural wealth, position, a language as strategic as it was a forum for revealing truths that lie behind the fiction. At some point the two come together, merge, are the same thing.

Artist website: rougelefebvre.wordpress.com