ART PRESS, Richard Leydier, april 2005
I first got to know Denis Proteor's work in 2001 when we were putting to bed a special issue of art press about "representing horror". His book "Parts pour l'âme chaudron" (Edition Marval) had arrived too late for me to include it in that rather singular publication. I couldn't get the pictures out of my mind. I didn't understand the meaning of these justapositions of magnificient flowers, mushrooms, wet genitalia, dead leaves and bodies cut up in the forensic lab. His photos of corpes are very different from the ones by Andres Serrano or by Diana Merchener, which convey a certain affection de circonstance for their subjects. There's none of that in Proteor. A first look finds no spirituality, no humanism, maybe just raw "reality": death as something organic and ineluctable ?
Meeting the artist brought me some enlightment, and opened the dooor to a huge and highly codified world : 2001, Proteor estimated his photographic output at over a millon images, to which must be added hundreds of hours of audio and video recordings, countless manuscrpts, drawings, paintings and sculptures. A genuine archive is piled up along the walls of his small appartment in Paris's eighteenth arrondissement. I also found out that the areas of investigation were much more numerous than I had imagined. Furthermore, I soon realized that I would need to "learn" the highly personnal vocabulary with which the artist conjures up a world all about Etat second (altered states), Enchantement (delightness), Energumènes (firebrands), Complicités (female partners) and Delivrance (free spirit).
