Since childhood, Greek mythology has inhabited Letizia Le Fur like an original language. It is perhaps this ancient link that led her to painting, then photography, in an attempt to represent the world through the prism of the imagination. In her series, she summons a powerful, sovereign, sometimes hostile nature, always stronger than man. Nothing decorative here: nature is a character in its own right, which crushes or fascinates, and whose color-saturated forms question our gaze, our fantasies, our relationship to the image. By saturating the hues or erasing them, as in her series " Discoloration ", she speaks as much about the environment as about cultural or identity erasure. Nourished by mythology, her work drifts towards a critical fiction, where visual strangeness serves as a revealer. Today, she continues this research with " Monsters ", a series on invasive species, and is preparing " Empire Garden », a photographic reflection on the plant traces of colonialism in European botanical gardens.

Music : " Forever Dolphin Love »

I often listen to music while working. Since 2011, the band Connan Mockasin's first album, " Forever dolphin love ", accompanies me very recurrently without me ever getting tired of a single one of its pieces. It's strange, soft, dissonant sometimes, exactly what I need to make my mind slip elsewhere. It has this slightly amphibian, aquatic thing, as if everything were floating. This album often helps me to conjure up forms that I hadn't foreseen. Generally speaking, this group from New Zealand totally fascinates me: their music doesn't age, it's unclassifiable. From one album to another, they manage to create very different sounds. And I find an echo of the diversity of my photographic work there.

Literature : " The Art of Joy " and " So we will go and find beauty elsewhere »

I am reading, at the moment, " The Art of Joy » by Goliarda Sapienza, it's an immense novel, a cry of freedom, intelligence, instinct. It was Guilou Le Gruiec, the former director of the Vu gallery, whose view of art means a lot to me, who recommended it to me. It was a revelation for her, and I totally understand why: there is such freedom in the character in this book. And at the same time, I started the latest book by Corinne Morel Darleux " So we will go and find beauty elsewhere ", very committed, very beautiful too. I have always placed beauty at the heart of my work. Just a few years ago, talking about beauty in contemporary art was almost vulgar. Yet I strongly believe in its virtue in art, in society... Beauty allows us to bear the rest. Just like Goliarda Sapienza, Corinne Morel Darleux speaks of disobedience, reinvention, feminine power, inner ecology. It's strange, these two books respond to each other, almost like two voices from the same story, and it nourishes me both to think about my relationship to the world and to imagine plant monsters, " Monsters » being the title of my next series.

Painting: the canvases of Aneta Kajzer

And speaking of monsters, I recently discovered the paintings of Polish artist Aneta Kajzer, and I was immediately adored. There is a form of joyful monstrosity in them, an overflow of forms, freedom in color… It’s alive, bizarre, and it reassures me to see that other artists are also seeking to evoke confusion. I love her practice: in very few gestures, she manages to mix intuition and precision.

Movie theater : " The Wild Boys »

The film " The Wild Boys » by Bertrand Mandico divides me and I like that… I never know if I like it or if I run away from it. This film tells the story of a sailor saving young boys who have a lot of adventures. Like in many of Bertrand Mandico's films, it's excessive, disturbing, sometimes unsettling, but there's something uncontrolled about it that I really like. I love the artisanal side of his films: no special effects, everything is DIY, a bit like Méliès. I have the same approach in my photographic work, at the post-production stage: slow and without a safety net. The opposite of what is done these days, of what artificial intelligence produces, that is to say, smooth images. I like the imperfect side of artistic work. Finally, his way of filming nature as a sensual, even sexual, entity that overflows everywhere, is something that I recognize in what I try to do, in photography. The nature I show is explicitly sexualized, even if I try to do it lightly.

Movie theater : " Pacification »

« Pacification » by the Spaniard Albert Serra, with Benoît Magimel, also touches me deeply. The film takes place in Tahiti. This lethargic atmosphere, this floating, that one can feel there, this saturated light, this dull threat… The film tells the story of the end of a (colonial) world, without ever pressing, but everything is there. It echoes my series entitled « Discoloration » which also takes place in Tahiti, but in reverse: he pushes the color to the limit, I had removed it. We both manipulate the image to bring out what is hidden behind it.

Contemporary art: Vivian Sassen, Agnès Goeffray, Noémie Goudal and Valérie Belin

Four artists also accompany me in a hollow way, very differently, but with strong resonances: Viviane Sassen, Agnès Geoffray, Noémie Goudal and Valérie Belin who was my professor at the Beaux-Arts in Tours. All these women have this common point, this same concern, to make reality take a step aside. This is something I also find in my work. In the first, I admire the freedom of composition, the way of twisting bodies, colors, shadows to create images that overflow with strange joy, visual freedom. With Agnès Geoffray, it's the opposite: everything is suspended, silent, tense. Her images have a serious sweetness, they speak of violence without showing it, as if something had been held back just before the impact. One teaches me to dare, the other to contain, to let it surface. This double movement, between tension and overflow, guides me a lot in my own visual research. With Noémie Goudal, I love the way she imagines settings from landscapes, playing between true and false. In her work, nature becomes a somewhat fragile and artificial theater. Finally, I've always been fascinated by the way Valérie Belin creates a confusion between the inert and the living, between the body and the object. Her images have something spectral, sometimes disturbing, which echoes my own research: how can an image both seduce and destabilize? I love this ambivalence, this tension between what is shown and what escapes.

Land art : Agnès Dénes and her wheat field

I could also mention the Hungarian artist Agnès Dénes, a pioneer of ecofeminism, whose quiet radicalism I admire. She tackles ecological issues with great joy and beauty. Planting a field of wheat at the foot of the Twin Towers in Manhattan, at the foot of the Twin Towers and Wall Street, in the 80s, was something that had to be done. A symbolic gesture to denounce world hunger and the evils of capitalism. She speaks of the world as a living organism that can be healed, disrupted, and questioned. She reminds me that art can offer simple yet charged gestures, political ones without slogans. That speaks to me a lot.

Walk: workers' gardens

Allotments' gardens particularly touch me. I find in them an unpretentious, DIY, spontaneous beauty. They are places of modest invention, of intimacy with the living. They say something about a gentler, more humble, more sensory relationship with the world. I see in them a form of silent resistance, a theme I wish to develop in a future project entitled " Empire Gardens "These hand-cultivated spaces, shaped with care and resourcefulness, nourish my photographer's eye as much as my imagination.

Where to see photos of Letizia Le Fur this summer?

1/ In Rennes, at the Frac Bretagne, in the collective exhibition " Invisible »

2/ In the South-West, in Mérignac, at the Vieille-Église and in the Vivier park, in the personal exhibition « mythologies " and " Discoloration » (until July 27)

3/ In Bordeaux, at the Freeze Frame Gallery, in the personal exhibition “ The Twilight of Places » (until July 27)

4/ In Bergerac, at Bergerac Photography Art Center

Letizia Le Fur is represented by the Galerie Julie Caredda (Paris).