Still Life @ Daniel Templon

American grotesque & fabulous photographer David LaChapelle is about to present 2 new series of his latest works next week in Paris for the first time: Still Life, and Last Supper.

World-renowned for his fashion photography and flamboyantly baroque portraits of celebrities, David LaChapelle proposes this time @ Galerie Daniel Templon a new approach that bears witness to his interest in the underside of the American dream and the history of art.

David LaChapelle is an icon hunter obsessed by the question of notoriety, and when vandals had attacked the Dublin Wax Museum he traveled there to make a record of the broken lookalikes, which led him to investigate many wax museums in the United States (California and Nevada).

The high point in this series is a new photographic fresco reinterpreting Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper. In LaChapelle’s interpretation, figureless floating heads and expressive, yet completely detached, hands shown inside cardboard boxes compositionally represent the original masterpiece of antiquity in an accurate yet startling contemporary way. The fragments of the broken models offer an image of raw piety, strangely resonant of the martyrs of Christian iconography. This is a recurrent subject for the artist who consciously or unconsciously mixes the sacred with the profane. This large panoramic image is nearly four metres wide, and owes as much to the tradition of the religious polyptych as to collage. Ten years after LaChapelle’s iconic Homeboy Last Supper, merging street art and religion, the artist continues to reflect on the resurgence of the spiritual in our material dominated society.

Dark pop culture coming to central Paris willing to reflect on the fragility of fame and power of the Hollywood Star System, something the French capital is somehow familiarised with. Many stills from these series can be seen on this website but for the real deal we propose you visit Galerie Templon next Thursday for the opening. More info this way.