Julien Carreyn: a malicious pleasure to watch from afar

Snap from Julien Carreyn’s studio in Paris. Photo by Oriane Durand

Arranged on small shelves, combined in display cases, or aligned on the wall as a series, Julien Carreyn’s photos, drawings and paintings constitute an intimate universe of desire and memory. The staging of his works, often of very small format, is inspired by the idea of a film synopsis, or even more, by the flatplan of a book. In the publishing industry, for which Carreyn was initially trained, the flatplan is the global representation on the same plane of the reduced pages of a book, page by page. Combined in this way, the images of models, interiors, street corners, or more abstract visions, activate a narrative whose story is not really revealed. Only the feeling of Sehnsucht circumscribes a novelistic perimeter. In French as well as in English, the word Sehnsucht does not really have an equivalent. From its root—Sehn (to see) and Sucht (desire)—it could be describing the desire to see something away with a distant eye, which is one of the properties of the camera.

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