The work of the artistic duo Elsa & Johanna weaves together photography, performance, and video in a visual language that, while rooted in the tradition of photographic portraiture, opens up to influences from cinema and advertising. The two artists, often the protagonists of their own works, take on the roles of multiple and shifting characters, constructing highly evocative and meaningful scenarios.
In this context, the theme of portraiture acquires a dual significance: on one hand, it conveys a poetics of introspection; on the other, it affirms an aesthetic of contemplation. The characters depicted are not merely alter egos, but reflective surfaces onto which viewers project their own emotions, experiences, and desires. The observer is thus drawn into an empathic experience, invited to recognize fragments of their own inner world within these imagined figures. Themes such as nostalgia, loneliness, femininity and masculinity, as well as the desire to escape reality, become recurring conceptual cores.
In Intuition 3, a work from the Sequences series, one of the two artists is portrayed wearing a vintage dress—an implicit reference to a past and undefined time. Her face is partially obscured by a white band covering her eyes, accentuating a sense of mystery and suspension. The setting is a wheat field, an archetypal landscape that contributes to creating a rarefied, almost dreamlike atmosphere. Here, melancholy and enigma converge, giving way to a void rich with interpretative potential.
The act of concealing the eyes—the gaze, a central element of both communication and portraiture—creates a rupture in the immediacy of the viewer’s connection to the image, prompting deeper reflection. Devoid of clear spatial or temporal references, the work situates itself in a suspended, almost timeless dimension. It is within this uncertainty that the evocative power of the piece resides: the viewer is confronted with a fragment of a story that remains untold, a distant desire, an unresolved memory resurfacing like an echo from the past.
The artistic duo, composed of French artists Elsa Parra (1990) and Johanna Benaïnous (1991), was formed in 2014, initiating a collaboration marked by a strong narrative approach and an interdisciplinary spirit.
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. Elsa & participate with the exhibition Lost and Found, presented at the Centre Photographique in Marseille. Conceived through a retrofuturistic lens, the project invites viewers to step into a space where memory and imagination intersect—a suspended dimension poised between the echoes of the past and visions of the future.
Elsa and Johanna
Intuition 3, Sequences series, 2024.
Courtesy of the artists.
20/08/25
