In I Heart You, Kourtney Roy presents a portrait that is strikingly pop and kitsch: a muscular, tattooed man in a swimsuit, his body entirely covered in oil, is framed within a heart shape formed by two hands. The image, deliberately exaggerated and caricatural, blends the visual language of advertising with references to desire and the performative body. Its overtly artificial aesthetic creates a tension between attraction and parody, rendering the work ironic but never entirely light-hearted.

The photograph is part of the series The Tourist, conceived as a provocative visual narrative. At its center is a tourist in search of the ideal husband. Her lavish outfits, perfectly styled hair, high-shine manicures, and meticulously posed gestures define a figure as refined as she is constructed. Every gesture, every shot, every detail is calculated, staged, and performed. The woman is consistently portrayed alongside athletic, oiled, and tanned men, engaged in a sort of seductive competition. The hyper-saturated colors and polished lighting enhance the sense of unreality: everything appears suspended between dream and parody, elegance and vulgarity, desire and disenchantment. The Tourist emerges as a sharp, irreverent reflection on the clichés of femininity, beauty, and tourism as a form of social performance. The ambiguity between irony and critique is subtle: the work amuses while simultaneously unsettling, exposing the artificial mechanisms that shape desire.

Kourtney Roy (b. 1981) is a Canadian photographer known for her distinctly cinematic approach to image-making. Her photographs are infused with a vintage aesthetic that recalls the visual codes of 1960s and 1970s pop culture. Through carefully constructed scenes, she crafts narratives imbued with ambiguity, unease, and suspension—qualities often tempered by a glossy, ironic, and almost seductive surface.

This article is part of the editorial focus that Generazione Critica is dedicating, throughout the month of August, to the festival Les Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles. In this context, Kourtney Roy presents the exhibition The Tourist, hosted at the Ancien Collège Mistral. Blending cinematic fiction and social critique, the series challenges aesthetic conventions, offering the viewer a gaze that is sharp, ironic, and deeply self-aware.

Kourtney Roy
I Heart You, The Tourist series, 2019–2020.
Courtesy of the artist / Galerie Les filles du calvaire.

06/08/25