VOIR ET REGARDER | ISABELLE FEXA

n the era of publicizing intimacy in an increasingly intrusive and indiscreet society, Isabelle Fexa intersects the seeing and looking in a very particular dialectical relationship. In fact, on the one hand, the artist observes, through the eye of her camera, intimate behaviours such as an investigator letting herself be guided by chance, the taste for risk and uncertain opportunism. On the other hand, the artist unearths, picks up and exhumes objects thrown into the garbage in order to list them, make an inventory and classify them as true confessional pieces, thus making it possible to create archives of the intimate.

For several years, the singularity of Isabelle Fexa’s artistic work has existed in her object of study and the way she understands it in our contemporary society. Applying social science methodologies of direct observation from a position of exteriority, the artist sets out to conquer the ethnology of intimacy. From then on, Isabelle Fexa reveals the hidden parts of an individual, the most honest parts of one’s identity, taking from it traces destined for certain destruction.

The Voir et regarder exhibition presents this process of objectivising the intimate, transgressing private spaces to make the ordinary, the everyday and the trivial the subject of investigation. Photographs of typical suburban house facades enter into dialogue with annotated envelopes and scribbled papers. Writing becomes an act of revealing the most personal and hidden thoughts, memories and secrets. Everything is exposed in a space that could evoke the living room of an individual, if not that of the artist in a transposed version, inviting the visitor to become a voyeur, an observer of this intimacy.