Ilanit Illouz 鈥� Au bord du Volcan
This exhibition marks the beginning of a new partnership between Le Studio and the Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP), launched in 2025 to support and promote contemporary creation.
鈥淎 volcano is a geological beast. You watch it from a distance for a while, looking out for its anger, gauging its rhythm鈥� And then鈥� you make up your mind, and go for it!鈥�
鈥� Maurice Krafft, volcanologist, 1979
The Studio presents the latest photographic project by artist Ilanit Illouz, created around Mount Etna in Italy, a volcano which remains active. The exhibition Au bord du Volcan was conceived as 鈥渁 narrative built around a cave in Sicily鈥�, in the words of the artist. This cavity, the result of a solidified lava flow, has spectacular strata that bear the traces of this fusion. In Ilanit Illouz鈥檚 photographs, this rock aggregate becomes a never-ending landscape, which disrupts our sense of scale through an immersion into its materiality. We wander through these mineral fragments as if through an enigma, trying to decipher their shapes like so many clues. In the same way as the volcanologists Maurice and Katia Krafft, it is almost inevitable that we project onto these heaps of granite a body or rather bodies鈥攐ften fantastical鈥攖hat seem to be intertwined with human and animal skeletons, as well as motifs of vegetation.
Ilanit Illouz captures the life that pulsates on the cusp of these rocks, the movement of the lava that once shaped them, but also the singularity of a place where 鈥渁 mystery is unfolding that is slower, more immense, and more profound than the fate of a short-lived species鈥�, bringing together two temporalities, our own and that of these immutable stones.
To make these mutations tangible, Ilanit Illouz has crystallized her prints using ashes and salt brought back from previous travels. This almost alchemical relationship with matter is reflected in the very processes of photography, namely the transmutation of substance into image.
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This exhibition marks the beginning of a new partnership between Le Studio and the Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP), launched in 2025 to support and promote contemporary creation.
鈥淎 volcano is a geological beast. You watch it from a distance for a while, looking out for its anger, gauging its rhythm鈥� And then鈥� you make up your mind, and go for it!鈥�
鈥� Maurice Krafft, volcanologist, 1979
The Studio presents the latest photographic project by artist Ilanit Illouz, created around Mount Etna in Italy, a volcano which remains active. The exhibition Au bord du Volcan was conceived as 鈥渁 narrative built around a cave in Sicily鈥�, in the words of the artist. This cavity, the result of a solidified lava flow, has spectacular strata that bear the traces of this fusion. In Ilanit Illouz鈥檚 photographs, this rock aggregate becomes a never-ending landscape, which disrupts our sense of scale through an immersion into its materiality. We wander through these mineral fragments as if through an enigma, trying to decipher their shapes like so many clues. In the same way as the volcanologists Maurice and Katia Krafft, it is almost inevitable that we project onto these heaps of granite a body or rather bodies鈥攐ften fantastical鈥攖hat seem to be intertwined with human and animal skeletons, as well as motifs of vegetation.
Ilanit Illouz captures the life that pulsates on the cusp of these rocks, the movement of the lava that once shaped them, but also the singularity of a place where 鈥渁 mystery is unfolding that is slower, more immense, and more profound than the fate of a short-lived species鈥�, bringing together two temporalities, our own and that of these immutable stones.
To make these mutations tangible, Ilanit Illouz has crystallized her prints using ashes and salt brought back from previous travels. This almost alchemical relationship with matter is reflected in the very processes of photography, namely the transmutation of substance into image.
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