In the wunderkammer, three photographs by Sophie Calle from the series Statues ennemies have as their subject religious works that were vandalised by iconoclasts: a wooden Christ disfigured with an axe, a statue of a saint enucleated and a painting of Christ shot up. These black and white shots show the destructive rage that can, at any time, animate the "barbarian", the enemy of freedom of thought. The purges experienced during the French Revolution or the Spanish War obviously come to mind, among others.
In his fine essay Le double corps des images, Jean Frémon writes the following, which echoes the work of Sophie Calle: "Vaudois, Albigensians, Cathars, Lollards, Hussites, Reformed, Circle and Square, Klein's blues, Manzoni's achromes, Reinhardt's black paintings, minimalists, radical paintings, successive cohorts of crusaders against the image. By what ironic reversal does the painting that banishes the image itself become an icon? A renewed devotion is transferred to this monochrome surface from which an inner light emanates. By positing the mystery of the Incarnation, Christian legend has definitively taken the side of images. The art of representation, its possibility and necessity, was born from this. All that remains today of religious thought has taken refuge in it" (in Gloire des formes, P.O.L., 2005, p.97).
These works are exceptional in Sophie Calle's work in that no text accompanies the photographs and they are single prints.