Fanny Lechevalier Lafon’s
Untitled work
(digital collage incorporating photograph by Arsen Petrov and painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau)
When Russia invaded Ukraine last year, French artist Fanny Lechevalier Lafon saw an ever-growing, ever-present roll of news photos—a barrage of horrifying images that record the war’s toll and tragedy and continue to haunt so many of us. “I have been touched by these moving and terrifying images,” she writes in her artist’s statement, “feeling very frustrated and powerless as a witness of this tragedy.”
Yet something familiar surfaced as she viewed the photographs: a depth of humanity, of evoked emotion, even of composition of forms. She began to see in them the paintings she studied in her fine arts education at École des Beaux-Arts: classical, historical works of art that shared elements of composition with the photographs or provided a lens to view them in ways that never removed the context of the wreckage, the lives lost, yet offered a way to sustain her gaze in a recognizable interaction. The far and the near may speak to each other and to us—and in that meeting bring something new.
