Editorial for Numero Jan04

Model: Isabelli Fontana

Benjamin Savignac, a French graphic designer, is taking this experimentation a step further by inserting conventional line drawings into the jumble of his cut-and-paste montages. Looking like tracings rather than inspired drawings, his figures are striking because they make no artistic claims. Their very blandness is provocative. They are disturbingly uncool, in sharp contrast with the hand-silhouetted photographs, splashes of color, squiggles, patterns, and typographical exercises woven into his collages. His drawings are lame, yet you can’t help but like them–against your best esthetic judgment.

Benjamin Savignac illustrations

Thomas Paquet website

From "All Dressed Up Nowhere to Go" series, 2005

People who see Wendelien Daan’s technically perfect, clean-cut images would not for a minute think she was autodidact.

Daan moulds her pictures with the utmost precision and attention to detail, creating beautifully pure sculptural images in which her eye plays over the exterior planes that enclose the human form. Although figurative, her photos in their surface division, refer to the graphic clarity of Mondriaan while the intensities of light and dark that glide over the body are reminiscent of Vermeer. "I would like to capture a worldly image in a photo in the same way the naked eye registers beauty", according to Daan. Therefore no fuzzy outlines, background and foreground are equally sharply focussed. Daan’s play on light and dark, her command of open and closed body language arrest the eye and emphasize female strength.

Wendelien Daan website

Savoir-Vivre issue 01

Theme: Tom Robbins

is now online.

the next issue: Alan Watts

Models are Kate Moss and Amber Valetta

Glen Luchford portfolio, managing by Art+Commerce