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PORTRAITS

Ils sont artiste, cheffe étoilée, designer ou apiculteur, pilote automobile ou créatrice de mode. Leur point commun ? Ces personnalités glamour ou au cœur de la vie culturelle, économique et sociale régionale sont les moteurs de l’actualité azuréenne. Découvrez sans filtre le témoignage de leur parcours, leurs rêves, leurs ambitions et leurs projets à venir.

February 2016

Irina Ionesco

  • Dark world

 

 irina double 2
 

Since 1964 when Irina Ionesco made her debut in photography, the dramatic atmosphere of her images has drawn constantly on her family roots. With a trapeze artist for a mother and a musician for a father, she was a snake dancer, contortionist and painter by turns before turning to photography. Imbued with Eastern influences, gipsy culture and the eroticism of the roaring twenties, she distils her vision of the world with extreme precision. A dark, lascivious atmosphere suffuses her photographs, which have been winning worldwide attention since the 1970s.

 

In the throes of legal disputes with her daughter Eva and now also her son-in-law Simon Liberati, Irina Ionesco acknowledges that her photographic work is controversial and sometimes considered scandalous. «So? That doesn’t bother me. Artists are often misunderstood. In my work I retranscribe my vision of the world, or what I see of it – which often exudes the collective unconscious. There is also my upbringing, my travels, especially my times in Egypt which marked me deeply, and certain written works. I immerse myself in life – my own, but also all the lives I see around me. Everyone is different, with a unique imprint. All that is what I immortalise in photos.»


«It’s true that I mainly photograph women, with a few exceptions for fashion shoots. No doubt women are mirrors for me, a psychoanalytical issue. Maybe a search for my mother ... Yes, I was brought up by my grandmother in Romania.»
As to her very personal world, Irina willingly describes it as tinged with darkness, inhabiting enclosed spaces, bedrooms, antechambers and boudoirs. An eroticism wreathed in mystery and flaunting demonic accessories, black and red, jewellery, lace, lascivious poses, dark makeup on white skins. This is the core of Irina Ionesco’s work. She has an exhibition coming up at the Reflex Gallery in Amsterdam from February to April 2016, with a series of hitherto unpublished photographs she took in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

 

21 May 1965: the birth of my daughter Eva.

1968: the revolution and me, first major photographic works.

1996-1999: travels in Egypt and work on the City of the Dead.

 

Par Louis Badie
Photographie- Portrait de Malika Mokadem

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