This memory has never left Antoine Conde’s mind. As a child, in front of his old television set, if he had the misfortune to press the pause button on the remote control, he risked staring at the image on the cathode-ray screen and leaving his mark there for several days. Ironically, Antoine Conde has since gotten into the habit of pausing series, pornographic films and reality TV programmes to take screen captures, which he has since built up into a huge digital library: the intensity of a look, the gracefulness of a figure, the harmony of an object… From now on, the many details that catch his eye will never leave him, meticulously filed away in folders. “You left a mark on my screen”, he seems to be saying to them with gratitude.

Today, these thousands of snapshots constitute the raw material for his graphic works, which he is showcasing in his first solo exhibition at the DS Galerie. Using Photoshop, the artist interweaves them into poetic compositions, a kind of collage that brings together a number of close-up faces, bodies that are always fragmentary, elements of everyday life and landscapes encountered during his digital wanderings. But where the computer screen puts the body at a distance, Antoine Conde embraces it again during the hours spent carefully reproducing his collages by hand. Screen becomes paper, paper becomes like skin. The image suddenly comes to life.

When he comes face to face with paper, the artist endows his visual poems with a new materiality and sensuality. With his pencil, eraser and fingers, he recreates effects of texture, relief and depth. Here, the muscles and pubic hair of a male torso are transcribed as meticulously as the petals of a daisy or the lace of a ribbon there. Halos of light and drops of water beading on bare skin illuminate the shades of grey with their dazzling whiteness. It’s almost as if you can touch these different surfaces, displayed head-on on the sheet as if they were pressed up against a pane of glass, in shots that are often very close to their subjects.

A graduate of the Arts Décoratifs and Beaux-arts in Paris, Antoine Conde began his career as a video director, developing a keen eye for editing, framing and staging. Today, from the ultra-desirable bodies of vintage gay porn to the views of a fantasised Beverly Hills seen on “Real Housewives”, or the world famous face of Britney Spears, the artist is particularly interested in these scenes and archetypes of a popular visual culture that is often denigrated, yet which he believes delivers some of the most authentic and spontaneous expressions of our humanity. In the works exhibited here, impudent looks, raw emotions and the faces of ephebes on the verge of orgasm are now mixed with more romantic symbols, inevitably evoking a double erotic reading: lollipops, stars, pearl necklaces. And, of course, knots appear as the common thread running through this new body of work, as we can’t help but observe the instinctive awakening of a collective memory, unmistakably carnal.

Text by | Matthieu Jacquet