The surprisingly sober course of relics of days, the personal exhibition of Anaïs Boudot, opens the gallery’s 22/23 season. Without any desire for sensationalism in their subjects, the artist’s images summon the plasticity of the photographic material and its memory capacity. Remarkable point of this exhibition, the presentation of his series The Forgottena declaration for the visibility of women.
On the walls of La Filature in Mulhouse are hung photographs that blur the distinction between film and digital by the texture that emerges from them. The author of the photos, Anaïs Boudot, blurs this border in an exhibition prepared by Smith and Nadège Piton, artist-researcher and performer brought together for this project.
Without taking any scenographic risks, all the works are at eye level. The rhythm is allowed thanks to the different image formats and by the alternation of black and white with gold. Many of the pieces in this exhibition are orotones, these proofs lined with gold with such a specific brilliance.
If the subjects of the shots vary, the artist’s works are linked together by his attachment to the modes of appearance of the images and by the question of their status, between documents and works of art. Beyond the composition of the shot, the support that makes it exist has its own importance in the final work. As an artisan of her photographs, Anaïs Boudot models them with her gestures.
Ancient techniques without being anachronistic
Anaïs Boudot’s photographic practice is not limited to the moment of shooting. Unlike the “decisive moment” dear to Henri Cartier-Bresson, the artist stretches the time of his images by experimenting with matter. His works refer to the past of photographic techniques, the contemporary reuse of which it would be hasty to designate as obsolete. If digital photography has undeniable technical advantages, silver craftsmanship summons other imaginations. Among these, the optico-chemical know-how, the tactility, or even the fragility.
Herbarium, one of the two projections presented in the exhibition, takes the form of a slideshow showing the fusion of chemicals and plant elements. A simple digital duplication transforms them into figures of Rorschach, this psychological test with ink stains. This collection of various plant species, bathed in reactive fluids, echoes the famous herbaria made by Anna Atkins in the 19th century.e century. Thanks to the contact technique of the cyanotype, the silhouettes of the plant species were printed on it in the cyan blue which gives this name to the technique.
Digital storage or portable gallery?
Recalling the beginnings of photography and its chambers (large-format bellows cameras), Anaïs Boudot uses glass plates previously coated with photosensitive gelatin. Nothing archaic either in the use of this process, because the images migrate from medium to medium, passing through a digital state.
In the series day by day, images taken from the artist’s phone gallery are printed on glass plates, cut in the shape of smartphone screens. Snippets of life, book pages, screenshots, several types of images coexist. Usually hierarchized among them, classified according to their aesthetic value and the intention that carried them, they are here put back on the same level, that of an appendix to memory. Who has never used the camera of their smartphone as a visual notepad? Without value judgment, the artist considers these pictures as objects worthy of interest.
With Anaïs Boudot, the risk of a stagnant nostalgia, linked to her work in pre-digital techniques, is countered by the fluidity of her images. Traveling from pixels to grains of silver, they manage to extract themselves from their original context to resonate differently.
Another series, another atmosphere. Contrary to the intrusion of digital technology into the film, the apparent solarizations (disturbances of the image during the print which jostle the shadows and the whites) of the rural architectures and plant elements of Day and Shadow are only the result of the handling of editing software. The darkness present in the frame joins that which surrounds the decoding of this series. In a documentary style, similar to an alternative real estate catalog, we understand the highlighting of what is humble. What does not appear spectacular at first glance becomes the center of attention: farm buildings, piles of wood, etc. Forming almost dreamlike (or nightmarish depending on the point of view) scenes with their black sky, these images allow independence in their understanding. Pure formal contemplation or manifest work in favor of the aesthetic legitimation of rurality, we still hesitate.
The need for special attention
If the strength of this exhibition is not in a particularly audacious scenography, we console ourselves through the fragments of surprise that emerge from the works. You have to get closer, look in detail, take your time to detect the signs of the artist’s gesture in the photographic objects presented. In these small accidents, traces of brushes or other asperities of the gelatin, nestles all the sensoriality of these pieces.
A few other events intervene in the course and enrich the experience. In the ambient air, an effluvium mimicking the association of plants and minerals, as on the mossy stones that we guess in the series Day and Shadow. A poetic fiction written by Hélène Giannecchini is discreetly blown away. Without immediately seeming like it, this text weaves links between the images, forming a thread that places them in the same story. Too bad that these words do not accompany throughout the exhibition.
The challenge offered to the observation of the spectators is particularly evident in the projection that ends the exhibition route, The Lake. Faced with this apparently fixed plane of a body of water, you have to concentrate for a while to see the modulations of the landscape. In the manner of a morphing (one image fading into another), the photographs scroll slowly, mix and bring regarding the change in appearance of the lake in a way that is almost imperceptible to us. Associated with this videographic work, an eponymous music by Victoria Lukas, hypnotizing and repetitive, reinforces this feeling of a scene which escapes, strange. And there once more, serving as a projection screen, gold is present.
Deconstructing the image to rehabilitate the muses
Loaded with more than current symbolism, the series The Forgotten which opens the exhibition, deserves to be noticed. The negative photographs show female portraits, distinctly marked by human interventions: cuts, folds, collages. Technical feat in the meticulousness required by the process. These images are enlargements of anonymous glass plates from the first half of the 20th century.e century, which Anaïs Boudot appropriated. Inspired by the pictorial work on glass plates by Pablo Picasso, this work is equally inspired by the highlighting of his toxic actions. Because the star painter, by his destructive behavior, stifled the independence and the artistic careers of the women who shared his life. Among them, Marie-Thérèse Walter, who can be found on a screen in the series day to day (picture above). In The Forgotten, the faces are recomposed if not exploded and fractures rearrange the compositions. The images carry stigmata that echo the very real ones forgotten in the history of art. By using anonymous silhouettes on which we can project multiple speculations, Anaïs Boudot insists on the ambivalent position of the muse, an admired but passive figure who can hide the work of a life.
relics of days is an incursion of memory into the present. The exhibition skilfully navigates through the material of the images, as well as through the symbolic charge they carry. The tactile character that emerges from the treatment of the works would have deserved a less conventional hanging. A presentation which would have underlined the intimacy of the artist vis-à-vis his supports, but also that emerging between the public and the photographic objects of Anaïs Boudot.
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Exhibition Anaïs Boudot, Relics of the Daysfrom September 10 to October 30, Tuesday to Sunday from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. at La Filature, 20 allée Nathan Katz in Mulhouse.