Critical acclaim

The beaches of the Adriatic coast, stretching for over a hundred kilometers between Venice and Trieste, have long been a familiar haunt for the artist. Children scream, their mothers soothe them, husbands bury themselves in sports newspapers, young girls parade in bikinis, and young men watch them with quiet anticipation. Life is here—social, coded, ritualistic, exposed. "The Italian soul is far more complex than one might think," the artist muses.

It was in this sweltering, electric atmosphere that the photograph Les Héros was taken. Thousands of people, clad in swimsuits, stand along the shoreline, gazing in the direction of the photographer. They seem to be witnessing the landing of a flying saucer. For years, many believed it was a carefully composed, staged photograph—but it was not. Reality has a way of surpassing fiction. The image, which traveled the world, was in fact a spontaneous capture of an unseen fighter jet performing an aerial display just above the beach, filling the sky with sound and smoke.

Another iconic image from the artist’s Venetian period, Le matin du monde, transports us to the beach at Bibione at dawn. The scene is atemporal, evoking an archaeological site with endless columns, a totemic landscape frozen in time. Within hours, life will return. But for now, in the silence of early morning, the place feels sacred. It is five a.m. The photographer presses the shutter. The decisive moment makes the photograph, Cartier- Bresson once said.

There is something absolute in the birth of a successful photograph—a perfect alignment of time and space, of the moment and the place, of the click, the capture. The photographer, armed like a predator, yet contemplative and enamored, exists in that liminal space between hunter and poet. In the 1980s, when he roamed the streets of Paris, his gaze was tender, embracing both people and the urban landscape. He was particularly drawn to the 18^th and 19^th arrondissements—his personal Carte du Tendre, mapping his affection onto the city.

Kiki of Paris himself is a man of tenderness. The French actor Michel Simon called him by this affectionate moniker as early as the 1960s. Later, Simon would introduce him to Henry Miller, the very man who, recognizing his eye, nudged him away from painting and into photography.

A Work on Memory and the Passage of Time
In the photograph Key West, a yellow taxi—just moments before—had dropped him off on a long road by the Gulf of Mexico. The image carries a strange, unsettling energy. It invites the viewer to interpret it freely, yet solitude is the undercurrent that pulls at its meaning. When the taxi disappeared into the humid heat, the artist felt abandoned—like an orphan, alone in the world. Only later did he realize how many others had known that same feeling.

At its core, his work captures the intangible. In Le dernier tour, a carousel spins for the last time that day. The passengers remain blissfully unaware, placing their trust in the ride’s hypnotic motion. An old man, thin and dignified like a lead soldier, operates the machine. He looks like the last of the Mohicans. The photographer wonders—where does time go? If this photograph aligns with contemporary aesthetics that embrace kitsch and popular culture, its romantic essence amplifies its meaning.

The body of Kiki of Paris’ work is relatively scarce. He destroys many of his images. Others simply disappear. At times, he reconfigures a photograph, as in the series Structures Polymorphes, where his process becomes
deliberate, crafted—an allegory. Ulysses, Adios Queens, Le Sacrifice des Innocents, Le Messager… Désolation Canyon merges a trio of figures the artist had captured in Charleroi, transplanting them into the iconic, desolate expanse of Death Valley.

Kiki of Paris’ photographs bear the imprint of a deeply personal vision—his unwavering love for the forgotten, for the spectacle of the everyday, for the poetry of the streets. There is Loulou, the small French dog who dutifully crosses only at the pedestrian lines to please his war-widowed mistress. There is Les Majorettes, the spontaneous smile of a young girl caught in a fleeting moment of joy. Without artifice, without pretense, his lens captures the intimacy that exists between beings and the world around them. His images make us reflect, move us, and for that, we owe him our thanks.

It is perhaps his proximity to literary giants—Henry Miller, Ionesco, Samuel Beckett—that has shaped the cartography of his art. Other formative encounters marked his path: filmmaker Joseph Losey, who instilled in him the rigor of indirect framing, and David Lynch, whose compositions inspire elements of the photographic discipline he has mastered with such finesse.

After studying the humanities and absorbing their intricate depths, Kiki of Paris devoted himself to life itself—capturing its ecstatic breath, framing the fleeting and the eternal. Thus began his humanist period, followed by Italian summers and their meticulous compositions.

A photographer of the immaterial, he loses and destroys many of his images—as if the sacred could only be rooted in the ephemeral, leaving behind only its intent. For it is intention alone that transcends the act, sanctifying its origin. Is this, perhaps, his guiding principle?

In his homage to Olivier Debré, he evokes the spirit of the Loire through ferveur—the painter’s cherished force, mirroring his own quest for chromatic quintessence. Their shared theme: vast skies awash in color, the silence of abstraction forging a bridge between photography and the intellectual constraints of abstract painting.
Where words fail, his images vibrate, filling the spaces in between.

"An intense blue, swollen with clouds, torn open in places like fractures of silence." American collectors were enthralled. Emotion ran deep.