Born in Paris in 1971, Sophie Delaporte is an artist and photographer known for her use of colour, staging, gestures and fantastical storytelling. Created with a theatrical eye, Delaporte's series of work Postmodern Mysteries was made with long-term and enduring collaborators, Ivan Pericoli and Benoît Astier de Villatte of French creators Astier de Villatte.
First premiering in Tokyo in 2010, and more recently coming together as a solo exhibition in 2016 at Sous Les Etoiles Gallery in down-town New York, Delaporte’s Postmodern Mysteries is an enchanting and meditative exploration into the realm of surrealism.
As noted photography critic Vicki Goldberg writes “Sophie Delaporte’s photographs for Astier de Villatte are as full of mystery as a collection of Simenon stories, as charged with ambiguity as a painting by Dali, and as partial to whimsy as a song by Noel Coward. The mysteries are decidedly post-modern; consisting of inexplicable actions, they involve no crime and have no solution other than anyone’s guess. The ambiguity is immutable, six centimetres of uncertainty evidently being preferable to a metre of clarity. The whimsy is one facet of an off-beat sense of humour that manages to combine melancholy, portents, and absurdity; cherishes fantasy; and relishes the odd and the almost ridiculous.
In short her art is a perfect fit for the furniture, the white ceramics, and the candles designed by Astier de Villatte, the firm founded by two men whose products include a hand-crafted ceramic copy of a Louis XVI-era cake mould fished from the trash, and a candle that gives off the scent of a haunted castle in Scotland, an ambiguous odour if ever there was one.