Frédéric Fontenoy was born in Paris in 1963, where is he has built his studio in his apartment, a place at the image of the character. His controversial artworks are disturbing and gripping. His work depicts domestic scenes in a dark room, a set full of antiquarian objects, reminiscing of the brothels of the 30s.

 

    In his pictures, his “character” appears as a perverse double, Fontenoy himself, transfigured in a sort of timeless individual moving in an identical set although variable, depending on the scenes, in his dark room, the room of a theatre or a mental maze. A persecutor, Fontenoy tortures his models. He ties them up, whips them, ties them up again, punishes them. The woman in his work is an object, sometimes a piece of furniture. He plays with fetishist clichés, eroticism and the BDSM universe, ropes, high heels, horsewhip and sticks including octopus and swastika. But even as victims, the models are in ecstasy. Behind those lustful images, the finish is purely aesthetic, the style extremely refined, the black and white associated with the contrasts of the different games of shadow and light is elegant, the characters are harmonious, and the viewer is a voyeur taking part in this debauchery. While his photographic series is disturbing and representing violence in domestic scene, outside of his studio, he creates unique photographic experience which told us a different story in the work called 'Metamorphosis'.

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  Frédéric Fontenoy’s Metamorphosis is reminiscent of an engraved distant memory of the body and its flux. Using a simple movement and dissecting it into a series of constructions merging into one single stream, we are bound to relate these photographs in an alienating way, to the expression of our own bodies. This is where the reflex comes in, an automatic instinctive reaction, not for the sake of an outcome; pleasure, joy or pain, but just as a counteraction to what these images provoke in our utmost primitive minds. Fontenoy created these self-portraits by using a panoramic rotational camera. During a 360-degree exposure, the image is scanned, distorted and stretched as Fontenoy moves in front of it. A body, stretched, distorted, beautifully ‘rolled’ out, three legs, two torsos and a multitude of arms stemming out of one sole human being, naked, amidst nature.