Deathday Party stages a dark, satirical juxtaposition between mourning and celebration, where three personas from the Self-Reflections series — The Boy, The Villain, and The Joker, three facets of the same person — converge in a surreal theatre of the absurd.

At the center lies The Boy, the embodiment of innocence and childhood, laid out peacefully inside a pink-lined coffin. Keeping watch around him: The Villain, cold and unmoving — perhaps the adult he grew into? — and The Joker, weeping in gold sequins, the fool mourning the death of his own childish freedom.

As the sequence unfolds, these split fragments draw closer, culminating in an unsettling embrace over the deceased part of the self. By fusing the festive iconography of a child’s birthday party with a final wake, the scene becomes an allegory for the end of youth.

SELF-REFLECTIONS is a series of satirical and surreal self-portraits, presenting a repertoire of four personalities that live inside the same person. Photographed as archetypes and fairy tale characters, they are named: The Villain, The Joker, The Prince and The Boy.

The images, meticulously constructed like paintings with in-depth work on their characterisation, colour and style, form allegorical tableaux whose narratives intertwine artistic, cinematic and philosophical references. They evoke the construction of identity, childhood, death, freedom, madness… sometimes to comedic effect.

Irony and subversion invite the viewer to a striking world filled with a strange chromatic unreality, a theatre of the absurd where a single actor plays all the roles.

— Présences Photographie, Montélimar (France), 2022.