olivier rebufa / barbie series

Olivier Rebufa is a photographer. He used affective and visual deceit in such a way as to make them his own. Using a basic system to implant his own image on a reduced scale into a world made up of Barbie dolls, he created a dream world where the female genre is timeless and forever smiling.
While this work seems simple at first glance, it examines man's duplicity, and constantly confronts us with those abominable stereotypes little girls know so well. He plays the father, the lover, the husband, and the hero.
His is in reality a perverse work where genuine tragedy co-exists with playfulness, and where we are called to witness the impossibility of putting an end to fears where madness lurks.
The pictures bring laughs; but the pathetic dimension is strongly present and levels all the commercial and ideological stratagems activated by Barbie dolls.
( ... ) Black and white and advertising's estheticism are used to create an additional distance with reality, even if we're dealing with self-portraits, because the conceptual coherency of these images requires that the artist be both the subject and the object.
Rebufa's is a pessimistic and denatured oeuvre, in the sense that it offers a false appearance. The clichés he inhabits resemble so many dreamed sequences, but the dream here is never realized. The events thus become nightmares at times and the appropriation of so much fake happiness demonstrates to what extent solitude exists.
Nathalie Viot, O.R. Le sens du modèle ( excerpts ), 1995

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olivier rebufa / barbie series

7 artworks to browse

Fumeur d'opium

La chute d'icare

Balade sur la corniche

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