Rawness of untouched land with fluidity of the human body, this is Metamorphosis by Frédéric Fontenoy…

I recently thought about the A-HA moment in art. The moment when the heavens and all of the planets align in perfect synergy to give way for your heart to go thud and your eyes to spin out of their sockets. This precise and also, unfortunately succinct moment is so rare and unpredictable. When we feel it, we are thrown straight into the artwork that stands in front of us and spat back out feeling like some kind of formless, weak-kneed, palpitating and hypersensitive mound of flesh.

This epiphany is what all artists and art-lovers seek and thrive to attain, to grasp, to possess yet is it as slippery as a giant carp, and as unpredictable as the London weather. Everyone experiences this revelation in a different way and it is impossible to classify what exactly makes us stop and take our breath for a second, when looking at an artwork – or to say the least it’s impossible to summarize it to a universal scale. So, on a very, un-universal, extremely biased and personal scale (isn’t that the definition of art itself?), I will try to express in words my most recent epiphany.

It has been around for the last twenty-eight years, and has definitely not existed incognito but I have only had the chance to lay eyes on it in the last few weeks. It is enigmatic, magical and raw with a touch of uncanny. It is called Metamorphosis by Frédéric Fontenoy. I realise how what led me to find this series of images is unfortunately unromantic compared to my initial description. Facebook: yes, indeed! In the most mundane manner of browsing whilst bored or simply curious to find out what has been going on in the world – or just to find some cute video of a puppy dancing with a racoon, I admit, I was browsing. What I did not expect on this platform was to have an artistic epiphany that I had forever longed to experience again, like an adrenalin addict that forever seeks to grasp that first rush, and relive it repeatedly.

What I saw felt like one of the most delicate and curiously beautiful images I had ever seen. In my eyes, as an artist, I was always in awe of the human body and its complexity. Another obsession of mine has been nature’s rawness and textures. It is for these two very distinct passions that my eyes were completely absorbed by these photographs. A body, stretched, distorted, beautifully ‘rolled’ out, three legs, two torsos and a multitude of arms stemming out of one sole human being, naked, amidst nature. How did he do this? Was my first exclaimed interrogation – right after jerking the computer as close as I could to my face without fusing with the screen. Frédéric Fontenoy, as I subsequently found out, is a Paris-based, French artist who created this series, titled Metamorphosis in 1988. Fontenoy created these self-portraits by using a panoramic rotational camera. During a 360-degree exposure, the image is scanned, distorted and stretched as Fontenoy moves in front of it. These images are so bewildering because not only do they instantly trigger a familiarity with the body – which we all possess – but with this also sources a gut-visceral-like feeling.

Activating our inner homo erectus, Fontenoy seems to call out to our primitive memory, deeply buried into our genetics. The series unravel with the artist in his utmost basic attire, skin. This naked human body is seen moving in icy waters, jumping through dense soil, or carrying his trails along sandy banks by the sea. If these scenes aren’t reminiscent of the basis of human life – yes, to all of you modern 21st Century individuals who might have forgotten where we come from with all this ‘Twittering’ and ‘Instagramming’ surrounding us – then I don’t know what is!

Not only does Fontenoy dig out our primal instincts where, in the blink of an eye, we could seriously consider the plausibility of ripping our clothes off and in a valiant act of insanity, swing our front doors open as we run towards the Thames shrieking ‘I’m alive!’ but, on a more ‘clothed’ note, he subtly draws our attention to human gestures. In this case depicting them in an exaggeratedly distorted manner to bring every turn of a footstep out and approach ‘bodily movements’, as art.

As we dwell within the realm of gesture, what interested me during my research in Fontenoy’s work, was to see that he drew a lot of his inspiration from the German artist Hans Bellmer. In 1957, Bellmer published a book of texts, drawings, sculptures and photographs that he created, in the search to elucidate the enigma behind the physical unconscious. The book, entitled Little Anatomy of the Physical Unconscious: Or, The Anatomy of the Image, has a striking passage that tied Fontenoy’s work with Bellmer’s ideas:
I believe that the various modes of expression: postures, gestures, actions […] all result from the same set of psycho-physiological mechanisms and obey the same law of birth. The basic expression, one that has no preconceived objective, is a reflex.

Could it be that this epiphany, this A-HA moment, is simply a sensory reflex into our deepest memories? Caused by an unknown force that seems strangely familiar to us? Frédéric Fontenoy’s Metamorphosis is reminiscent of an engraved distant memory of the body and its flux. Using a simple movement and dissecting it into a series of constructions merging into one single stream, we are bound to relate these photographs in an alienating way, to the expression of our own bodies. This is where the reflex comes in – an automatic instinctive reaction, not for the sake of an outcome; pleasure, joy or pain, but just as a counteraction to what these images provoke in our utmost primitive minds.