Artist Statement
Denis Rouvre is one of the most renowned French portraitists at the present time.
His portraits are published in national and international press titles. His series have been widely exhibited in France and abroad. He also published several books. His recent projects focus on Man's relations to strength, between power and fragility.
He was awarded Second prize of World Press Photo 2010, as well as a Second prize of the Sony World Photography Awards, for his series "Senegalese wrestlers" and "After meeting".
He is represented by Bailly Contemporain Gallery in Paris, Project 2.0 Gallery in The Hague and Fotografenwerk Gallery in Düsseldorf.
Process Statement
Since 1992, Denis Rouvre has been taking portraits of people on display, in the time it takes to broadcast a news item. These models have a whole multiplicity of images, each conceived to suit their latest film. And each of these fleeting encounters poses a challenge: how to forget - and get them to forget - the character who sticks to their skin.
“The natural does not exist,” he explains. “I photograph only one reality of a person, the moment that gets away from them and belongs to me alone. I need to make my model curious about an image of him or her that I might be able to produce.”
Denis Rouvre’s portraits do not narrate anything. Instead they capture the visible detail of
a spontaneous gesture, a sudden strangeness, a brief emotion.