A typology of the corpus of images of Lara Gasparotto reveals the insistent figure of a woman: young, sensual, sometimes contemplative to the point of withdrawal. It is these figures, immature and sexual, which enable the intimate to be juxtaposed with symbolic representations of the world. We detect a whole choreography, which is a quest for unfolding: how can we extract ourselves from the foetal and from our grandiose projections which replace our own experience of the world? How can we plunge into the water, that other recurring figure? Swimming, bathing, and plunging – all various scenes of baptism in the physical sense of the Greek word baptein, meaning “to plunge into a liquid”. Undulation, that simplified ceremony of baptism, would be one of the keys of Lara Gasparotto's book. A succession of baptisms of desire, rituals that are erotic and sacred at the same time, full of ghostly images also, and of disquieting landscapes. Here, all the intimacy that is revealed is a sacred gesture.

Lara Gasparotto practises photography in shamanic form. Admittedly, the views of her journeys and her daily life that she preserves have the rough nature of actual experience, but, far from any naturalism, they contain traces of something sacred. Thus Lara Gasparotto seems to doubt the world and to believe in ecstasy. But the ecstasy concerns the image regimes even more than the convulsive bodies, and to achieve that tension, the photographer practises the art of juxtaposing different, even opposite, types of photographs.

The photographer’s work proceeds from a dynamic of the relationships between the images. For her generation, the black and white and the four-colour, the posed image and the instantaneous one, the documentary style or the search for symbols, the reproduction and the original, are unceasingly conjugated, ignoring categories and schools in equal measure. A vernacular image, an historical reference or even some fortuitous editing or technical negligence are never thought to be of value at the sides of a portrait or a landscape. We could also call it rhetorical diagrams: no narration in the true sense of the word, nor any daily chronicle but rather, on the contrary, conceptual thematic or literalistic sequences… The world of Lara Gasparotto's work is part of this reinvention of the photographic grammar at the beginning of the 21st century.

The artist likes to recall the intuitive nature of her practice. Journeys and family and friends, impressions and chances which little by little reveal a poetic world. That is however without taking account of the subjects which detach themselves and testify to a meticulous construction in order to arrive at an appearance of ease and especially at the consonant nature of the book, in spite of the piecemeal choice of images. Lara Gasparotto thus manages to produce a representation of the world on the basis of an intimist tonality. This route from the prosaic to the symbolic, from the everyday to elation that is sometimes mystical, therefore plays not only in the insistent iconography, but also in the heterogeneity of the visual categories: the ecstatic is thus born from a kaleidoscope of visual practices which endlessly recomposes the figures of desire.

Text by Michel Poivert