LE NON DUPE ERRE
Text from the presse release of the solo exhibition Les Chemises de mon père, at CACN, Centre d’art contemporain de Nîmes, 2019
– By Jean-Christophe Arcos

For the Centre d’art contemporains de Nîmes’ last exhibition in its current location, Baptiste Rabichon unveils one of his most intimate projects, one that draws as much inspi- ration from his own personal history as from the history of the city of Nîmes itself. After having exhibited his work in India and China, Arles, Paris, and Roubaix, the artist returns home to the city of his roots.
But this is not, strictly speaking, a work of remembrance: Les Chemises de mon père (My Father’s Shirts) doesn’t simply recall some distant past, a childhood memory or even a nostalgic reminiscence- On the contrary, temporalities collide and merge, levels of history are superimposed one on top of the other, mixed materials and techniques weave together images that are less like an unambiguous narrative than a fusion of motif, medium and intense reflection on their alliance.

Through his Chemises, Baptiste Rabichon makes visible just what is currently at stake in contemporary photography, as well as the traces of what he has borrowed fromthose who have come before him. By placing some of his subjects in close proximity to the photosensitive paper and casting their sha- dows, the artist recalls Sir John Herschel’s an- thotypes, or the cyanotype still lifes of Anna Atkins (Baptiste Rabichon often gravitates towards the oral and vegetal world, as in his series Ranelagh, Natures mortes aux silhouettes or, more recently, 17ème).

Rabichon’s use of chromogenic de- velopment, (the successive and combined oxidization of a developing agent and a coupled color pigment), demonstrates an advanced understanding of the chemistry used in analog photography, but also a syncretism between absolute control of the process and the urge to let go. Technical mastery and se- rendipitous reactions work together to form the final image.
Yet another layer is then added to this initial chemical collaboration, one that weaves the work together with the contemporary: the role of the machine.

The recurrent, but not exclusive, use of a digital scanner is seen by Baptiste Rabichon as a way to complete his vision: the digital eye discerns and restores that which the hu- man eye cannot see. Just as Antonioni’s Blow Up had predicted, nothing escapes it.

Either as a way to humanize it, to diminish it, or simply out of playfulness, the mechanical precision employed by Baptiste Rabichon is often altered, tinkered with, leeched, defor- med. Mutilated and pushed to its limits, this precision gives way to an intriguing array of unexpected results: Stains, glitches, and dif- fraction are markers of phenomena inherent to modern optics and which the artist allows to be assembled on the same plane, brining into question the act of seeing itself.

“A true medium condenses several surfaces” — this was already a credo of the Cubists, who were adamant about proving it. They wanted to show everything, including the hidden facets latter pursued by Louise Bourgeois in her Fabric Works, for example.

And yet folds in the image hint at drapes hidden from view; stains eclipse pieces of matter – It is as if a stain protects as much as it spoils: spreading out over the skin of a photograph, a stain gives us access the fore- ground, as well as allowing us to dive into the deeper layers and strata of the image. Different states of visibility overlap: the same textile is scanned, photogramed at a distance, projected… underscoring the complexity that any image constructs.

Imagination is no longer suf cient to make an image: Between vision and realization, a series of movements, of phenomena, of events unfold in a chronology of challenges and trial runs. The result is not a triumph over adversity, but rather a palimpsest marked by otherness: If it is as much an act carried out “against the machine” as Baptiste Rabichon claims, it seems to also be an act of resistance only within the bounds of a cooperative proximity.

This association of man and machine is no doubt cemented through our relationship to code: While the former hopes to main- tain an authentic connection to the real, dis- pensed from the relativity and subjectivity of language, the later is activated only by an objective and preprogramed logic. Between clash and articulation, Baptiste Rabichon and his photographic devices reclaim the funda- mental ambivalence between illumination and the occult.

Therefore, while these Chemises address the patchwork of patterns and imagery of indiennes de Nîmes, the threading of the fabric, the gesture and sometimes the figure (the body) of the artist, they attest most of all to the impurity of artistic creation, of the work, which having brought into the world so many serendipitous aberrations, remains acu- tely aware of its empire, as well as its instabilities.