The Vanities series, made up of 8 black and white gum bichromates made on watercolor paper, shows a walk in a gallery of portraits and alludes to the pictorial gesture, to History and to the cabinet of curiosities.

Through this series, my intention is to converge art, sciences and imagination. I worked with X-rays of human heads, which I combined with a selection of collected insects.

The images overlay successively into pigment layers, exposed to the light then striped off. So many alchemical gestures to play with layers of time.

Does it mean “embalmment”? To scratch, scrub, dig the image. This image, which as a body—under unstoppable tools hits, reveals the fragility of the material, its evanescence. A movement would be enough to make everything disappear.

Are we facing a new funeral ritual? Let’s believe in the immortality of the images... Or in photography as an embalmment technique!