Placed under the sign of duality, Nathalie Rao's first exhibition cultivates the paradoxes and ambiguous relationships that all beings maintain First clue to this quest for identity, the work entitled Vrai(s)emblable(s) which is composed of two portraits at first sight identical, twin and yet different. Voluntarily dissociated in the exhibition space, this diptych by the apparent similarity that it stages reveals the small gap, the interstice that separates reality from the fiction, the true from the probability. 

Genuine male pendant, Sleeper is part of the same approach in these two photographs, the same man, lying on le ground, seems According to the point of vue of the artist, sleeping or can be worse…If vrai(s)emblable(s) offered us a frontal view, the framing and the angle of view of Sleeper causes  a circulation of the gaze inside the image and consequently the outline of a story. 

  The spectator, although he has an alternative (the choice between two situations antinomics: sleep or die), wife the vision of Nathalie Rao. 

  This freedom is  this privilege, the artist nevertheless abandons it in the installation From you to me by entrusting to relatives or strangers the task of taking her picture in different places public. The series, made up of several dozen photos, draws by petite touches a portrait of the artist, but even more certainly, raises the question of the identity of ces anonymous photographers. 

  After exposing herself to the gaze of others, Nathalie Rao ends up turning the lens back on herself. Fruit of a performance where the artist holds a camera at arm's length and films himself embracing people.

  Between the spectator (the other) and herself. The device, governed by the arm of Nathalie Rao, records the images blind because no eye really guides it. 

 La approach reaches its peak in the work Voi, where the video although made according to  the same process incorporates a new element: the complete blindness of the artist during the filming. Sum of visions or absence of gaze, all of the works presented in this exhibition (installations, photographs, videos) offer the viewer a journey in which everyone builds their own reality .
 

Text Fabienne Fulcheri