Balances

Balances it plays with lines and volumes—extensions of the body, tensions, or, conversely, points of support that unfold in space. Somewhere between DIY and photography, it captures a fragile balance. 

We open ourselves up to an experience, to another person—in this case, the photographer. We let go for a moment, however fleeting, which is already a lot. We forget about control, distort the frame, and envision the shift through simple wooden slats, in an act that embraces its fundamental futility.

whether bordering on performance, in the privacy of a bedroom, or more openly in hallways and living spaces, what have emerged are at once armor and crutches, nests and spikes.

A project carried out during a residency in 2024 at the Adolescent Care Unit of St. Vincent de Paul Hospital in Lille.
 

Reenactments — Indian ink wash on watercolor paper
drawing on research into photographic archives at the Ruhr Museum, Lionel Pralus chose to combine fragments of images into a strange, unsettling, and at times violent narrative that breaks away from reality. These fragments of stories have been redrawn and transformed by this shift from the technique of reproduced photography to the unique and irreversible gesture of wash drawing.

This shift to drawing arose primarily from the artist’s inability to access the digital images gathered from databases.  Then the time spent gazing at the sheet of paper—so different from that of a photographer facing his camera or computer—immersed him in a form of meditation, in heightened attention to these magnificent archives, with the ink wash drawings transforming into a tribute, and at times into an erasure.

Based on photographs by: Rudolf Holtappel, Peter Kleu, Willy van Heekern, Ruth Hallensleben, Johann Schmidt, Johann Schmidt, Anton Tripp, Marga Kingler, Christoph Henning, Wolf Schöne, Wilhelm Reimers, Herribert Konopka  - Photo Archive of the Ruhr Museum.

Day Night — Texts engraved on Plexiglas and framed photographic prints.
Night is day / Day is night offers a timeless moment through lighting that blurs our sense of orientation, with images in which a patch of light or color emerges. As a counterpoint to the neutrality of hospital lighting, these images—accompanied by a short text, sometimes just a single word—evoke that unique moment during sleep when one loses all sense of orientation.

The text design, developed with the young people following a discussion during the photo shoot, was then the focus of a therapeutic outing to the Condition Publique in Roubaix to laser-engrave the words ontoPlexiglas, which was then superimposed over the photograph.

A project carried out during a residency in 2024 at the Adolescent Care Unit of St. Vincent de Paul Hospital in Lille.

Beneath the Surface — Van Dyke prints on Arches paper
drawing on a selection of photographs from the early 20th century through the 1970s from the Ruhr Museum, Lionel Pralus explores the traces left by images. A hold on memory, but also a physical imprint on paper, one that sometimes threatens to fade away. By transforming a selection of images, he rewrites his own story, populated by phenomena and figures wandering in the darkness.

This work involves manipulating photographic material and reflects the artist’s desire to use manual and traditional photographic processes—in this case, the Van Dyke process from the late 19th century. The images become difficult to date; they lose their informative quality and drift into darker realms.