The installation starts at 16 pm.
Live Performance starts at 19:00 pm.
Last Tango in Paris is a performative exhibition that I conceived as a tribute to Bernardo Bertolucci's film released in 1972.
Combining self-portraits, drawings, photography, songs and videos, this ephemeral exhibition aims to explore different facets of my theatrical universe. In the first room are three screenings of three films made this summer, in the Berlin capital.
The first film "double agent" is a story made from 35 self-portraits taken in a photo booth in Berlin. Exploring the theme of identity through the transformation into different characters this project opens the way to a much larger question which is that of our presence in the world: who we are, how we define ourselves and how to go beyond of our own image.
The second film is a project that combines parody, archive and the world of fashion. With the help of actress and model Paula Kletschke, we imagined a humorous video that traces the life of model Twiggy in the 60s. Clothes, hairstyle and makeup are tricks that lead the viewer to believe in this fantasy while everything is false.
In the third video that I present it is a collage of different highlights of the summer that I experienced in Berlin. I wanted this film to reflect the profusion and richness of summer. Summer is a period that I particularly like because it is there that a more human dimension develops, of openness and sharing, but also of perdition and danger. A school of life. Finally, during the screening of these 3 videos which will run in a loop, I will sing my version of 3 songs from the group Buena Vista Social Club, as a tribute to my Venezuelan origins and my Latin American identity. This character will accompany the videos with both his mysterious voice and his reassuring, warm presence.
In the second room there are different works, combining drawings and photography. The series that I entitled “Berlin” fruit of several months of adventures in the heart of the German capital, between 2019 and 2021. The beauty of Berlin lies for me in this incessant exchange with different types of beauties, body, face and presences which each time opens a new space of understanding, tolerance, openness.
Diverse, plural, independent and free, this community is above all a loving family, a reservoir of talents, artistic projects and ambitions. Actors, dancers, students, artists or bartenders, they are all children of a future that never stops changing. By combining the theatricality of the costumes with the nonchalance of the models, this galaxy of faces offers the viewer a feeling of closeness while leading him to dream. The transformation of these humans into characters is a poetic manifestation that aims to reveal to their other hidden identities.
Artist: Laurent Poleo-Garnier
Born in Paris in 1995, Laurent Poleo-Garnier began his studies at a school of visual communication (ECV Paris) before heading towards the visual arts. After a preparatory class, he joined the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2015 and the Atelier of photographer Patrick Tosani, then that of Marie-José Burki and finally Hélène Delprat in her final year. There he explored different modes of expression such as video, dance and photographic portraits which would become his favorite subject.
In 2019, as part of his Erasmus exchange, he went to study at the UDK in Berlin and graduated from the Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2020. The same year, the Festival d'Automne selected his portrait of François Chaignaud for its campaign. display in Paris. A first personal exhibition was recently dedicated to him at the Galerie du Crous in Paris, in February 2021 and more recently in august 2021 at Studio Beta, a new gallery/studio showing the works of emerging young talents in the Berlin scene.
Laurent Poleo-Garnier recently won for his portraits the Picto fashion photography price in Paris at the museum of Fashion, Palais Galiera. This price was directed by Jean-Paul Gaultier and Paolo Roversi. He will create a special work at studio Daguerre in Paris for the house of Chanel and its atelier of Métiers d’Arts, called 19M.
Today Poleo-Garnier works and lives in Berlin where he continues to create films, performances, photographs and drawings. Encountered around clubs, shops or streets, his models with a nonchalant attitude express the duality of Berlin, between strength and fragility.