Series of 20 Numbered and Signed Copies for Collectors
Technical Sheet: Four photographs, Fine Art Giclée Print, Museum Quality, 230 gsm paper. Dimensions: Total sheet size: 27 x 34 cm. Color area: 25 x 25 cm. Limited edition of 20 copies + 3 A/P. Each work is delivered numbered and hand-signed by the artist. Year of original work: 2014. Year of edition of this series: 2026.
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This edition brings together selected images from the Latente collection, internationally exhibited around 2015. The Hidden Sound of Man Ray develops a reflection on the different roles of femininity, the object, and its symbolic limits, drawing on the female figure and the iconic musical sign of Man Ray’s photograph Le Violon d’Ingres. The series consists of four images, which can be exhibited individually or as a polyptych.
The hidden sound of Man Ray
This edition, The Hidden Sound of Man Ray, pays tribute to the celebrated photomontage Le Violon d’Ingres (1924) by Man Ray, one of the most eloquent icons of the representation of the female body in the history of modern art. In it, the nude back of the model Kiki de Montparnasse (whose real name was Alice Prin), visually transformed into a musical instrument through the superimposition of a violin’s f-holes, ceases to be a body and becomes an object: a resonant surface, malleable and available to the gaze. The woman does not appear as a subject but as a symbolic support; aesthetic matter that can be tuned, possessed, or interpreted by an external will. The Surrealist gesture, far from liberating the body, displaces it into a fetishized dimension where the feminine is instrumentalized and aestheticized until it becomes an artifact.
Created in the context of the interwar avant-gardes, in a period marked by the crisis of modernity and the rise of fascism in Europe, Man Ray’s work finds here its hidden sound—echoes a century later. In this hidden sound of Sampedro, the modern mechanization of the body gives way to its contemporary virtual construction, in a present that compels the image to redefine itself in the face of new forms of authoritarianism and symbolic control.
In the images of Martín Sampedro’s series, its hidden side is addressed. The female figure no longer appears from the back, from the objectual anonymity of the fragment, but in frontal view. This shift in axis is not merely compositional, but profoundly conceptual. The virtual frontality proposed by Sampedro implies appearance, confrontation, and, in a certain sense, the restitution of subjectivity. The body ceases to be merely a surface upon which a sign is inscribed and becomes tattoo, identity, wound, and presence.
Thus, while in Man Ray’s work the visual metaphor transforms the body into an instrument, in Sampedro’s interpretation the musical sign is integrated as tattoo, identity, and shadow. The woman no longer functions exclusively as an aesthetic artifact but as an image conscious of her own representation. Objectification does not disappear, as the dialogue with the original work keeps it latent, but it is displaced into a reflective territory where the viewer confronts the tension between body, symbol, and image in contemporary visual culture.
Selène Veyrat