Baptiste Rabichon
Ne jamais en faire un substantif - Installation - 2017
présentée dans le cadre de l'exposition panorama 19
A cross between a camera obscura and a computer screen, between chemistry and pixel, Baptiste Rabichon experiments with new ways of producing images. The works he presents at Panorama 19 hybridise analogue and digital, bringing up to date early photographic techniques that don’t use a camera and that distort the latest technologies. Often composed of several layers corresponding to so many different and successive actions, Rabichon’s images intend to render visible a reality that escapes the human eye or photographic optics. This is why he removes or blocks his camera lens and creates reproducible digital images with cosmic evocations, by subjecting the photosensitive cell to direct contact with a ballpoint pen, lasers or X-rays. The latter testify to Rabichon’s work focusing on an airport scanner, whose security purpose he subverts in order to discover its artistic potential and to obtain still lifes of translucent objects and abstract photos between randomness and repetition. In its formal diversity, Baptiste Rabichon’s wide-ranging research thus seems to have as common denominator the phrase announced by Vilém Flusser in Pour une philosophie de la photographie (1996): “To be free is to play against all the cameras.” Étienne HATT
Baptiste Rabichon
Born in Montpellier in 1987, Baptiste Rabichon lives and works in Paris and Tourcoing.
After studying viticulture and oenology, he attended the National Schools of Fine Arts (ENSA) in Dijon (2009), and Lyons (2011), before studying at ENSBA in Paris, where he attended the studios of Claude Closky and Patrick Tosani. He graduated with a DNSAP in June 2014.
Baptiste Rabichon maintains a critical yet passionate approach to the photographic image. He continues to explore age-old processes such as cyanotype printing, composing photograms, and using pinhole cameras, all while extending the possibilities of digital photography and using the tools of modern image making.
In 2015, for his first solo exhibition, «Tout se délitait en parties», at the Crous Gallery in Paris, he presented a series of prints that seamlessly blend traditional photographs with photograms. He is currently working on large format photography, using both traditional and digital technologies to expose overlaying images onto a single photographic print.
In September 2015 began his course at Le Fresnoy, Studio national des arts contemporains.
