Youssef Nabil. De rêver encore

Since the 1990s, the Franco-Egyptian photographer-videographer Youssef Nabil, born in 1972, has built a body of work with a very strong visual identity to which the musée d’Orsay has contributed decisively. His first visit to France and his discovery of the museum’s collections in 1992 remain a source of inspiration that has permeated his work for over thirty years, as evidenced by the self-portrait The Dream (2021), in lineage with Le Rêve by Puvis de Chavannes. The exhibition of Youssef Nabil, which makes him the first artist to take over the Orientalist gallery, is an opportunity to put his works into perspective with those that marked him within this space, which, along with symbolism, forms the heart of this aesthetic rapprochement. The black-and-white silver prints enhanced by an ancient hand-coloring technique by Youssef Nabil evoke the glorious and fantasized Egypt of his childhood – the artist’s country of birth – and summon visual atmospheres with velvety tones. His work, which borrows from the registers of dream and nostalgia, seeks to move away from purely identity-based questions to embody a Mediterranean world without