The portraits that Cécile Decorniquet offers in her Childrenâ?? series, question the limits of representation and show a dreamlike world tainted with fancy and poetry. With no melancholic or wistful eye, the artist dresses up and makes up these little girls, and portrays them as if they were Victorian ladies. The mischievousness that emanates from her work challenges and questions the audience. Her vision draws its inspiration from Mark Ryden â??s paintings and without any doubt from Lewis Caroll's Alice Liddell. Yet this mere interpretation would be misleading. These little faces who give us a wry look eventually pertain to a dreamlike world. Cécile turns away from photography's initial function - which is to imprint some kind of reality- offering us a fantasized vision of childhood and immersing us in a surreal world - as if we were on the other side of the mirror on â??the looking glassâ??.
After her first series, at age fifteen, on young women and pre-teens, French photographer, Cécile Decorniquet, (neighbourhood of Paris, 1983) started working on her children series Ingénues and Ladies in 2008.
Graduate from the Gobelinsâ?? school of photography in Paris, she works as photographer and develops her artistic work that she began to show in galleries and festivals in 2008.
Influenced by the work of Joel Peter Witkin, Jan Saudek, Mark Ryden and even david Lynch, the artist is working on children portraits, on the ambiguity between childhood and adulthood , on a fantasy world of her own, where nothing is really as it seems, nor set in any place or time.
She actually continues exploring childhood world with new works to come and developing her current series.
