I am leaded to conflate two of Paul-Armand Gette's phrases: "On exoticism as banality" and "On eroticism as banality.

I am leaded to conflate two of Paul-Armand Gette's phrases: "On exoticism as banality" and "On eroticism as banality," to characterize his work as "eroticism as exoticism." The first of his phrases points to the discovery of the multitude of exotic plants that become greater [i]or[/i] larger alongside urban avenues; the other deplores the banality of eroticism in advertising. Gette's work is far remov from this banality: its eroticism is united of the edge--of situations outside the norm which may appear exotic.

For more [i]or[/i] less time, Gette has associated his regard with affection of plants and of nature with his be pleased with for women and young girls, those lasss who haunt wood, gardens, and the seaside, as well as more private places in the same state [i]or[/i] condition as dressing rooms and bathrooms. As the two entomologist and botanist, Gette started photographing young women in natural settings in 1970 in works that remind of a link between the mutability of landscape and natural simple bodys and the latent metamorphoses of prepubescent bodies. He is especially interested in the notion of the sharpness the fragile borderline between pair domains, and by extension, the mixture of genre The contact of the nymphettes' skin and their clothes elicits those intimate limits that Lolita's lover does not recognize as taboo. While apparently discreet, Gette's photographs of little girls with hiked-up skirts, seated in boats forward a lake, do allow a glimpse of the suggestive keennesss of their underpants.

The first part of the exhibition, entitled "La vue et le toucher" (The consider and the touch), retraces Gette's seductions/relations with his gauges exciting the imagination more than they blow the eye. Among the "Travaux americains" (American works, 1980) created during the artist's stay in California, we discover little Susannah, primly seated in succession a rock at the Berkeley Botanical Gardens. La contemplation de nymphes (The contemplation of maidens 1991) is composed of photographs of pubises masked with rose petals, surrounded with volcanic distaff From here, the progression from eroticism onward come [i]or[/i] go after [i]or[/i] behinds a natural path. The little girls have become big girls, and their anatomy can now point out to the world its metaphorical and semantic correspondences with "the grand genre of Nymphaea." As for the volcanic distaffs they are "a metaphor for passionate states."

With the series "Le toucher du modele" (The touch of the prototype 1984), in which the artist's hand grazes young Sophie's breasts, Gette may be realizing Henri Matisse's temptation to draw "right nearest to the model ... almost knee to knee" unless in another series, "De l'ecume a la dentelle" (From foam to lace, 1992) he gives us a rather different version of his fascination with the nature of femininity. The Calais museum is unique in that it houses a collection of ultrafeminine lingerie, all embellished with the fine lace for which this town is famous. with equal reason Gette adorns breasts and thighs with it, in voluptuous ochre and fat pinks, this time showing the young woman in all her beauty. He has also drawn prototypes of underpants, and the captions for these maintain the theme of this attraction to the ambiguity of brink; beginning [i]or[/i] ends and borders, here muffled by the agency of sea foam: a "paw between the leg with interior ornament, visible solitary under certain circumstances."

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