Browsing through Allyssa Heuze’s photographs is, one rapidly remarks, like taking one path and unexpectedly finding oneself on another. A slide leads us to a pair of buttocks encircled by a hoop, a baseball player hits a home run which leads us to two small breasts drawn by the shadowed outline of two plump apples, and even to those gazed upon by another young man, his head submerged beneath a t-shirt. References to play punctuate Allyssa Heuze’s labyrinthine journey between her images: ball games, gymnastics, role play. This photographer’s preferred terrain is the studio, where she seems to take pleasure in constructing her dramas and her absurd scenarios. Herein this white cube willingly yields, where one may make believe that the real, the duration of the photographic shot, has no hold. She invites her friends within, a banana and doughnuts, an erupting volcano, and an aeroplane vulva in an inventory that is all the more burlesque as it is presented through a precise, almost clinical, photographic vocabulary. A balanced light, controlled reflections, a careful composition: together they hold all of the attributes of a style with a perfect appearance that this photographer – who certainly knows all of its rules – takes pleasure in making slip.
