"Lee"

gelatin silver print with passepartout

signed on verso

For those familiar with Sissi Farassat's work, Revelation is above all a surprise. A pioneer of interventions in her photographic prints with beadwork and many other ways of enlarging the image through a manual treatment of its surface, Sissi Farassat proposes here a reverse method. The original image is found and then painted over. We only see it in fragments and have to guess at it. The desired object is only revealed by concealing it. It is about the body, the face and seduction. What we perceive is reminiscent of a time when the attributes of beauty were defined by the codes of films and magazines; we still find the somewhat old-fashioned elegance of Hollywood women and staged kisses. But strictly speaking, Revelation is also completely faithful to Sissi Farassat's approach. By using popular photographs on which she embroiders or weaves (Stitch, Pin Up, Contactsheet...), she continues the contemporary practice of photo-upcycling. Here, the particularity lies above all in the fact that the covering of the image is achieved through the work of cropping or, more precisely, through the game of concealment: Showing the image assumes a strategy of blindness. What we do not see occupies a prominent position. What is devoted here above all is the off-screen as a space that is simultaneously real and imaginary.
(Michel Poivert, Die Nacktheit der Bilder, in: Sissi Farasat, Revelation, 2023, translated by deepL, PDF)