Gregory BAÔO’s work explores how archival images, icons, and collective mythologies can be reactivated in the present. Through a practice in which material, light, and manual intervention are layered onto photography, the original image is subtly displaced to reveal an inner, sensitive, and symbolic dimension.

 

The figures he revisits, actresses, muses, or legendary silhouettes, are not treated as objects of nostalgia. They become contemporary presences, shaped by the tension between public myth and intimate identity. The body, often framed as a visual structure or sign, oscillates between movement, protection, and silent affirmation.

 

Material plays a central role in this transformation. Crystals, selective color, and manual gestures are not ornamental. They create an additional skin for the image, a fragile and vibrant surface where light deposits a new memory. This visual stratification inscribes the artistic gesture within time, between archive, trace, and renewal.

 

Gregory BAÔO’s work questions what we project onto icons, what we believe we recognize, and what remains invisible. Rather than illustrating the past, it opens a space of reinterpretation, where the image becomes alive again, silent, inhabited, and enduring.