The temporary exhibition - "Embodied Intimacies": Veils and Pearls - The Dissolute Century

Updated on 15 August 2026

Welcome to this third post of the month. After storytelling and graphics, today we enter the most sensitive sphere of the studio: Embodied Intimacies. This is the moment of the month when I invite you to slow down, to come closer. This category is dedicated to sensuality, the grain of the skin and the authenticity of stolen moments. Less pose, more presence... it is an invitation to see beauty at its most fleshly and most human.

Pearls and Veils

The Dissolute Century

Pearls and Veils - The Dissolute Century

A tulle veil placed over the head, falling to the hips. Beneath it, a black corset and pearls that descend in loops over the belly. The background is verdigris, the smoke rises. The artistic nude of The Dissolute Century fits within these few elements.

I started from the libertine eighteenth century, that of boudoirs and drawn curtains, the one Laclos recounts in Les Liaisons dangereuses in 1782. I kept three signs of that century and left everything else in the cloakroom: the veil, the pearls, the corset. No period set, no furniture, no gilding. The studio stays the studio, with its backdrop and its smoke.

I worked the tulle like sculptural drapery. I sculpted for four years, and the question hasn’t changed since: where does the fold fall, and what does it let through. Here the veil does both at once. It covers the head, the shoulders, the upper chest, and it gives the skin back through transparency where the light passes through it.

The light comes from behind. The flash passes through the tulle and lights it from within: the threads turn white, almost electric, while the body keeps a blue cast. The smoke takes on this same light and fills the background, from dark green to grey. This backlight does all the work of separation: the veil moves forward, the body steps back half a pace.

The pose leans backwards. The head tips back, the chin lifts, the eyes close. The dark, curly, voluminous hair slips under the veil and spills into the blur of the background. An earring catches the flash in passing. The torso turns three-quarters, the arm stays along the body, and the pearls follow the curve of the belly and descend below the waist. The black corset structures all of this from beneath, its vertical boning cutting the light.

The retouching shows, and I let it show. The verdigris background is constructed, the smoke reinforced, the halo around the veil opened up with a brush. I deepened the blacks of the corset so the pearls stand out, nacre against matt material. I kept grain in the shadows, because skin lit by flash through tulle always keeps a little noise, and that noise is part of the image. The pearls were reworked one by one in the areas where the tulle flattened them.

It is the sensuality of that century I was looking for: desire that stays beneath the fabric and comes through in detail. A lace, a pearl, the angle of a nape. The series works this line from one image to the next, varying the height of the veil, the tension of the pearls, the opening of the corset. The artistic nude arrives through transparency, in the thickness of the tulle, rather than through outright unveiling.

The veils also create their own geometry. Depending on how they fall, they draw triangles, columns, bells. Each fold sends the light back differently, and each variation changes the temperature of the image: the more the tulle thickens, the more the blue wins out.

The exhibition is hung in the Visual Narratives room. The €19 ticket opens the four current exhibitions for seven days. The Patrons’ Circle also opens the whole Reserve, where the variants of this series and the longer takes on the same veil set-up are kept. Come and see how the light holds in the tulle. Pearls and Veils, the new theme of the week.

To see this week’s exhibitions or all of my work, here are the options:

Access with a member account	The temporary exhibitions	The Reserve the Patrons’ Circle

I hope this sensual interlude touched you. Only one last door remains to be opened to close the month in style. Next week, I will unveil the What’s New in the Studio series, the final bouquet where I allow myself every technical experiment and the most accomplished stagings. Be there for the end of the cycle!

Accès mécènes

Yohann

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