View of the exhibition Chambres avec vues, Abattoirs de Bomel – Centre Culturel, Namur (Belgium) – 2022

7 collodions on framed glass plate – 18×24 cm – 2022-in progress

Portraits photographiques a series of sentences collected in cafés and exposed on glass plates using collodion, one of the first techniques for making photographs. Here the artist draws a parallel with the photographic portrait and its ephemerality. The person being portrayed poses for a short time and then gives a glimpse of himself. In the same way, the sentence originally gleaned from a short moment and offered for reading can return a reduced image of its speaker and then constitutes a perfect photographic portrait. 

The artist has also chosen not to fix the printed image on the plate, thus causing the background to gradually degrade and eventually disappear and become transparent again. The glass plate is thus brought back to its original state. Here it attempts to approximate the “micro-experience of death” that Roland Barthes speaks of when he describes posing to be photographed.