Fabien Dettori

Fabien Dettori (b. 1971, Versailles, France) is a French artist whose practice moves between photography and painting. Introduced to photography at an early age through his father, a photographer, and to painting through his mother, Dettori began working as a photojournalist as a teenager before moving into fashion and studio photography in Paris. His early career brought him into contact with photographers including Paolo Roversi, Dominique Issermann and Patrick Demarchelier. After periods working across photography, music and moving image, Dettori returned to the photographic object with an increasingly material approach. His work combines analogue photography with painting and traditional craft processes. Polaroid emulsions, pigment prints, Japanese paper, acrylic, varnish and 24-karat gold leaf are transformed by hand, making each work a physical object rather than a reproducible photographic image. Drawing on chiaroscuro, the history of the nude and still life, and references ranging from Caravaggio and Titian to Rodin, Schiele and Lucian Freud, Dettori explores memory, vulnerability, imperfection and the unstable boundary between the sacred and the profane. Gold frequently appears not as decoration but as a means of revealing rupture. Influenced by the principle of kintsugi, damaged or fragmented photographic surfaces are repaired and emphasised rather than concealed. His recent bodies of work bring together intimate portraits, nudes and still lifes in which photography gradually moves away from documentation toward interpretation, materiality and memory.