Ilanit Illouz — Au bord du Volcan

This exhibition marks the beginning of a new partnership between Le Studio and the Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP), launched in 2025 to support and promote contemporary creation.

“A volcano is a geological beast. You watch it from a distance for a while, looking out for its anger, gauging its rhythm… And then… you make up your mind, and go for it!”

— Maurice Krafft, volcanologist, 1979

The Studio presents the latest photographic project by artist Ilanit Illouz, created around Mount Etna in Italy, a volcano which remains active. The exhibition Au bord du Volcan was conceived as “a narrative built around a cave in Sicily”, in the words of the artist. This cavity, the result of a solidified lava flow, has spectacular strata that bear the traces of this fusion. In Ilanit Illouz’s photographs, this rock aggregate becomes a never-ending landscape, which disrupts our sense of scale through an immersion into its materiality. We wander through these mineral fragments as if through an enigma, trying to decipher their shapes like so many clues. In the same way as the volcanologists Maurice and Katia Krafft, it is almost inevitable that we project onto these heaps of granite a body or rather bodies—often fantastical—that seem to be intertwined with human and animal skeletons, as well as motifs of vegetation.

Ilanit Illouz captures the life that pulsates on the cusp of these rocks, the movement of the lava that once shaped them, but also the singularity of a place where “a mystery is unfolding that is slower, more immense, and more profound than the fate of a short-lived species”, bringing together two temporalities, our own and that of these immutable stones.

To make these mutations tangible, Ilanit Illouz has crystallized her prints using ashes and salt brought back from previous travels. This almost alchemical relationship with matter is reflected in the very processes of photography, namely the transmutation of substance into image.

Image en une : Ilanit Illouz, Au bord du Volcan, 2025 © Ilanit Illouz

Ilanit Illouz is a graduate of the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy (2005), she has exhibited at a number of institutions, including the Paysage de l’Île de Vassivière, the FRAC Grand Large – Haut de France (2022), the Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val de Marne, MAC VAL (2019), and the Institut de la photographie de Lille (2020). Her work is held in the public collections of the Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val de Marne (MAC VAL), the V&A (London), the FRAC Grand Large, the Centre national des arts plastiques (Cnap), the Collection des rencontres d’Arles, Neuflize OBC, Photo Élysée in Lausanne, as well as in prestigious private collections.