Close-up

Close-up is an exhibition dedicated to the works of Kazakh painter Aziya and French painter Frédéric Léglise, centered around the theme of portraiture, its brilliance, and its mystery.

What else to paint but the enigma of the gaze? Entering the paintings of Frédéric Léglise and Aziya is like stepping into a film. Here, fatal women languish with a scent of allure and defiance. 

The framing is tight as if the face becomes the canvas itself, with a focus almost exclusively on the eyes. The desire is to get as close as possible to the subject, to their face, their presence, and to fully immerse us in the figure.

In Léglise’s work, the framing tightens further; the close-up is not enough. He needs to go beyond, to zoom in until the painting itself becomes the model. The portrait shatters, repeats, and reproduces itself in a variation of angles, as the painter immerses himself in a myriad of fragments; Léglise creates his own cinema.

"An artwork is only completed by what first breaks it, turning it into a fragmented work, a piece of the real world, the debris of a symbol."
— Walter Benjamin