“Concerned with questioning society, its paradoxes and its limitations, Elsa Leydier provides a series of images that explore “the notions of beauty and femininity that bombard the contemporary era”. She is careful to present these photographs with a certains amount of distance, by continuing to remind us of their two-dimensional surface and by emphasizing the mechanisms that construct them. She specifies: “bringing the images back to a state of surface objects and their materiality is a constant concern in my work. It is decidedly impossible to dive into my photographs, as you constantly come up against the mechanisms that have constructed these images”. Here she chose to re-photograph certain photographs by placing plastic bags in front of the lens to form coloured filters for the female faces. Defined as “sad symbols of the era of mass consumption in which we live”, these plastic allegories are brandished like meaningful objects, which reveal and colour as much as they mask the faces. With this mechanism, she defines a vision of society in which binary and paradoxical consumption participates in the construction of femininity while simultaneously preventing access to it.”

Dior - The Art of Color 2019's jury