By creasing photographs from the golden age of porn magazine, Patrick Weidmann dismantles their deep-rooted conservative values and reconstructs an underlying aesthetics, an underside of desire.
Magazine de Charme had its heyday during the seventies before sinking into obsolescence. Its eroticism suffered a similar fate. Nearly off the wall nowadays, this object bears undeniable physical and semantic qualities at its heart: triumphant consumerism, promiscuous but conformist iconography, straight confident ideology with rigid principles and no sexual deviance. Photographer Patrick Weidmann engages in a systematic deconstruction of the object and its content by distorting and creasing its surface. Paradoxically he primarily seeks to restore its discreet beauty and fake timelessness – the underside of desire. The "Magazine de Charme" series was presented for the first time in 2006 at the group exhibition "PHOTO-TRAFFIC." Centre de la photographie at Geneva (CPG) devoted a solo exhibition to Patrick Weidmann in 2012, following the publication of his first monograph at JRP|Ringier (Zurich), in which was an essay by Joerg Bader, director of the CPG.