PARIS PHOTO 2023
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PARIS PHOTO 2023
Baptiste Rabichon, Dune Varela, Yang Yongliang, Zhang Kechun
NOV 9th - NOV 12th, 2023
NOV 9th - NOV 12th, 2023
Grand Palais Éphémère - Booth C21
BAPTISTE RABICHON
Baptiste Rabichon composes his photographs like a painter. An RC photographic paper is his blank canvas, a territory of exploration for his composition process, mixing analog photography, digital images and the projection of diverse objects from his daily life. Within the darkness of the darkroom he gathers his memories while shaking up our relation to photography. Flowers picked a few days before are placed on the enlarger and mixed with pictures collected from the Internet or in magazines. But the almost scientific approach of his aesthetic, which might evoke the herbaria of 21st century botanists, is disturbed by the sensuality of a mysterious female silhouette gently lying on the paper
Born in Montpellier in 1987, Baptiste Rabichon lives and works in Paris. After viticulture and oenology studies, he went to ENSA Dijon in 2009, to ENSBA Lyon in 2011 and finally to ENSBA Paris in 2012. In 2015 he joined the National Studio for Contemporary Arts (Le Fresnoy) from which he graduated in 2017 with honors from the jury. He was the recipient of the 2017 BMW residency and participated in the 63th edition of the Salon de Montrouge.
DUNE VARELA
Dune Varela is an artist dedicated to photography in its dual dimension of testimony and alterable material. Playing with the intertwining of times and eras, she works with the image as if it were a ruin, a relic, caught in the movement of speculative archaeology and a history that is as much written as it is erased or fragmented. She offers us a journey into the fictional future archaeology that she outlines year after year, relying on a very personal form of destruction-construction that symbolizes a vision of the human condition. « I seek to make photography into sculpture, to reappropriate the image by giving it a new body. […] » notes the artist.
Dune Varela was born in 1976 in Paris. After studying law in Paris and cinema in New York, she dedicated herself to analog photography, exploring its dual nature as a substantial and essential substrate, as well as a fragile and alterable material. Later, she expands her research to include video and cinema. She has exhibited at the Rencontres d’Arles photography festival, Paris Photo, the Approche salon, the Nicéphore Nièpce Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Liège, and the Hear Strasbourg. She lives in Montreuil and is currently a resident at Poush Aubervilliers.
Inspired by shanshui, classical paintings of mountains and waters, the overall vision of Yang Yongliang’s work is reminiscent of landscapes. But a careful examination reveals complex superpositions of metal lattice towers, skyscrapers in ruins, electricity pylons and other man-made forms. While the ancients sought to convey the feeling of the immutability of nature through the stroke of the brush, Yang Yongliang endeavors to express in his digital landscapes this cycle of demolition and construction that is perpetuated before his eyes, and notoriously in Shanghai, his hometown. The result is a work in which the seductive appeal of urban modernity is simultaneously accompanied by an awareness of its fragility.
Born in Shanghai in 1980, he studied traditional Chinese painting with the calligraphy master Yang Yang for ten years. Photographer, painter, videographer and visual artist, he graduated from the Shanghai Institute of Design and the China Academy of Arts in the fields of visual communication and design. He is now a professor at the Shanghai Institute of Visual Art.
ZHANG KECHUN
Zhang Kechun’s style is strongly inspired by the traditional representation of the landscape combined with an objective photographic approach. Human traces are still visible, the omnipresent urbanization and industrial development has reached the most remote rural areas. Its palette includes the yellowish hues of the Loess Plateau and the deep blacks of the extractive industries that pollute the soil without respite. Slightly saturated details sometimes highlight unexpected appearances in abandoned and ghostly places, offering poetic and almost surreal nuances to the shot.
Zhang Kechun, born in Bazhong, Sichuan Province, currently lives and works in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, has been awarded the Discovery Award by the Arles Photography Festival in France. His works have been featured in exhibitions such as the Museum of Photography Berlin, the Bangkok Contemporary Art Biennale, and the Arles Photography Festival. His artworks examine China’s post-industrial landscapes. He captures epic scenes with large-format cameras that hold significant meaning in terms of national identity. Zhang explores the relationship between cultural heritage and the influence of modernization.