The photographs of Julien Palast, accurately retouched by Thierry Peureux, are a careful work on the body and its aesthetics.
The SkinDeep series unveils bodies as objects, male or female. Anonymous under the latex, they emerge from the background, reshaping, pulling, lifting up the membrane.
The sculptural anatomies are drawn onto the surface of the material, like a instant bas-relief. The flexible and wrapping material is printing the naked body surface, the elasticity and the shininess of the plastic is underlining the curves of the models and is coating them with a second skin. Thus the reified body is appearing in a bare simplicity that the artificial colours contradict.
Somewhere in the middle of petrifactions of Pompei, weather damaged statues, kinky madonnas and fetish techniques (bondage and vac-bed), Julien Palast is staying in this in-between : screaming mouth and wrinkled hands are evolving between the sensitive and the Skin-deep.
