A recurring tension in Juliette Roy Batanero’s work is between presence and withdrawal. Her photographs often place the human body front and center, yet the face—the usual anchor for narrative and emotional legibility—never meets the viewer’s gaze. Instead, her subjects consistently turn their eyes away, drawn toward something just outside the frame. At times, the positioning of the body—how a spine curves, how hands drift into empty space—becomes the work’s primary expression, the physical form carrying more weight than any explicit gesture or emotion.
This deliberate suppression of direct emotional cues forces the viewer’s attention elsewhere—toward the choreography of limbs, the tension between bare skin and empty space, the silence held in each carefully framed gesture. Intime, one of Juliette’s recent photographic projects, is a black-and-white nude series centered on a single female figure. The body is placed in a minimalistic, almost clinical environment, stripped of visual noise and expressive warmth.
Juliette Roy Batanero, Intime, 2024, black and white photography. Courtesy of the artist
Rather than inviting the viewer into a scene of intimacy, Juliette constructs a deliberate void—an emotional vacancy mirrored in the subject’s eyes, which drift past the camera rather than meeting it. The result is not sensuality, but a measured distance, a body presented for observation rather than connection.
“I wanted emptiness, not emotion,” Juliette explains. It is a formal strategy that defines much of her practice: to strip the body of narrative legibility and place the burden of interpretation squarely on the viewer.
Between Image and Sequence
Juliette’s background in both photography and video complicates the stillness of her images. Her sense of the cinematic doesn’t come from plot or dialogue, but from the poetic weight of individual shots—those self-contained moments where movement stalls, and emotion settles into the frame like dust caught in afternoon light.
Mariposas (short film), 10 min. Written and directed by: Juliette Roy Batanero, Cast: Luz Pastor Hernández y Samay Barshay Pastor. Courtesy the artist
Rather than chasing seamless narrative flow, she prefers a more fragmented, elliptical approach, where meaning is found less in what happens next, and more in the emotional residue each image leaves behind. This quality—an openness to pause and drift—echoes the spirit of Éric Rohmer’s cinema, where minimal action unfolds against clean, unembellished compositions saturated with soft natural light. In Juliette’s work, this same visual restraint serves a purpose: stripping the image down until all that’s left is its emotional temperature, leaving viewers to inhabit the silence between gestures.
This filmic sensibility shapes her process from the start. Ideas arrive not as clear stories, but as loose flows of images, like disconnected frames searching for their own rhythm. Even her photobooks resist the logic of a traditional portfolio, leaning instead toward a cinematic sequence, where each chapter reads like a scene, its pace dictated by mood rather than narrative.
In Juliette’s hands, medium becomes secondary to the staging of time itself. Still images adopt the temporal weight of film; videos adopt the compositional clarity of photography.
Isolation as Method, Not Theme
The word “isolation” comes up frequently when describing Juliette’s work, but for her, it is less a thematic obsession and more a method of working. Her subjects often occupy minimal, emotionally emptied spaces—places that are not designed to tell a story, but rather to strip everything away so that only the body, the gesture, and the atmosphere remain.
Juliette Roy Batanero, Venus as a Boy, 2023, black and white photography. Courtesy of the artist
“I’ve always been drawn to portraying people in very minimal, empty spaces,” Juliette explains. “It’s not necessarily about loneliness, but about removing all distractions so the focus is entirely on the subject.”
This approach defines her ongoing photobook project, a work centered explicitly on isolation, divided into four chapters: nudes, individuals, couples, and group portraits. Across these images, she explores the physical and emotional distance between bodies, and how that distance shapes our understanding of presence itself.
Echoes of Liu Shiming
When Juliette Roy Batanero first encountered the work of Liu Shiming through LABA Valencia, she approached it with curiosity rather than expectation. What she found was not just an unfamiliar sculptural language, but a sense of recognition—a shared instinct to capture fleeting moments of everyday life and preserve them, not as historical records, but as emotional traces.
What struck Juliette most was Liu Shiming’s ability to embed humanist spirit into the smallest gestures: the bend of a worker’s back, the weight in a boatman’s hands. “There’s a naturalness in his work, a rawness that feels deeply human,” Juliette reflects. This directness, this respect for the ordinary, resonated with her own desire to portray bodies not as symbols or performers, but simply as they are—present, vulnerable, in motion.
As the first-ever recipient of the Liu Shiming Art Scholarship from LABA Valencia, Juliette’s practice brings a unique perspective into the Foundation’s growing network of scholars. Her background—rooted in European cinema, experimental photography, and cross-cultural artistic dialogue—broadens the scope of what this community can represent. Her focus on isolation, fragmented narratives, and the visual language of emotional distance adds an essential voice to a conversation that spans continents, disciplines, and generations.
Juliette’s presence within the Liu Shiming Scholar community is not only a recognition of her talent, but also a testament to the Foundation’s commitment to fostering a diverse and borderless artistic dialogue—one where each artist’s voice enriches the collective understanding of what it means to see, to create, and to remember.
Written by: Chirui Cheng
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