ANIMA - Perth Centre For Photography, 26 September - 07 November 2020


 ANIMA. The inner feminine side of a man.

 

Christophe Canato has made his name in France, Australia and Singapore as a photo-media artist. His work examines male roles and identities in our contemporary western contexts. Canato is interested about exploring social issues such as politics and religion, including physical identities and sexual orientations.What questions this artist is the notion of belonging or rejection and the status that man is supposed to hold in society. 

 

Canato’s new work Anima is an immersive, polychromatic photographic series that is exploring the inner feminine side of the man.

 

The Anima is both a personal complex and an archetypalthat expresses the fact that man psychehas a minority of feminine qualities according to psychologist Carl Jung (26 July 1875 - 6 June 1961). It is an unconscious factor incarnated anew in every male child and is responsible for the mechanism of projection. The Anima versus Animus are described by Jung as part of his theory of theCollective unconscious.In every man there is a woman and in every woman a masculine side, her Animus.

 

On the other hand, one of the factors that the artist likes to take into account in his research is the colour of the skin. But this time Canato is interested in the extraordinary character of the imaginary skin colours such as blue, green, red or white although making references to codes recognizable by all. To name a few Krishna or Shiva as part of the Indian divinities and in another register James Cameron’s fiction Avatar.

 

 

Biography

 

Born in France, Christophe Canato undertook postgraduate studies in Grenoble and Paris, where he continued to live and work before moving to Perth Australia in 2005. His work has been exhibited in more than fifty solo and collective exhibitions including the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. Multiple prize winner Christophe Canato’s photographs are also included in public collections such as Artbank Australian Federal Government collection. His series are published internationally in France, England, Australia including the Chinese magazine Photoworld with a eight page publication, March 2020.

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