Jeffrey Silverthorne — À propos — Slash Paris

With a pronounced taste for staging, Jeffrey Silverthorne’s photographs uncompromisingly display bodies in their most disturbing and universal aspects. Drawing overtly on the compositions of Rembrandt, Velázquez and Goya, Silverthorne constructs his scenes like paintings, giving the portrait genre — his personal specialty — an existential, even mythological depth. From the prostitutes of Nuevo Laredo (from the Tex-Mex series) to the corpses of Rhode Island (Morgue Work), the vision he builds up prevails over documentary objectivity and reveals its subjects in all their ambivalence. The erotic quality of weary or inert flesh is treated with detachment. Here and there in the course of the different series, we find unusual props, or collages of shots and negatives that add to the strangeness of the images. Often playing the role of the vanitas, they slip in the themes of physical degeneration and death, accompanied by oneiric elements. Underscored by a flash or a naked bulb, these dreamlike or nightmarish visions cast a raw light on the most intimate desires. Thus, recent series such as Suzanna and the Elders and Growing Older dramatize, in the form of self-portraits, the artist’s relationship to his model as well as the mechanisms of desire that drive him. Sexuality and death vaunt their timelessness, fuelling a creation parable. But each time the unlikely and the comical are there to distance the inherent cruelty of these images; and scenes of mythological or biblical inspiration turn to farce when the miracle of an Annunciation takes place in the shambles of a kitchen.

— Antoine Camenen for L’ahah, 2019
(English translation : John Tittensor)