Sarfati's favorite mode is contrast: day/night, black/white, rogue/angel, indoor/outdoor; Blond against black velvet, brown against a white wall. Here, ecstasy flips back a faceless model next to the photograph of the face of a male statue. There, the model wraps herself next to an anonymous American drawing from the late forties. These young faces themselves contrast with the outdated décor (leopard skin carpets, Greek meanders, music-hall accordion) and with the equally dated techniques (halo lighting, twinkling blur, psychological shadows of atmosphere, backlit profiles). But while old nude photographs are poignant because we know that the models are dead now (every photo is about death, as Barthes demonstrated), in Sarfati's old-fashioned photographs, the paradox is that these boys of yesteryear are terribly present, picked just five minutes ago. [...]

Sarfati never lets us confuse art and life. These photographs are not snapshots. The bodies are worked, inflated, oiled and skilfully lit: the heads are placed to the millimeter; The effects are so sought after (light emanating from an aquarium without fish, stalagmite climbing along a raised torso) that we can not forget the artifice. Revealing artifice can be a real enjoyment (what Russian formalists call "laying bare the process"). Sarfati looks like the illusionist who opens the box to show us how he went about sawing the pretty lady in half.