Éclipse

As part of the Bicentenary of photography, Drawing Lab, a laboratory for experimentation and the dissemination of contemporary drawing, is putting together a group exhibition highlighting the links between photography and drawing.

While Nicéphore Niépce invented photography in 1826, his contemporary Henry Fox Talbot also believed he had discovered, with photography, a "loyal pencil", capable of capturing and naturally fixing the writing of light and shadow. He also called photograms "photogenic drawings", sensitive impressions obtained by direct contact, the very beginnings of photography.

While photography is now recognized as one of the great artistic mediums, it is still in close dialogue with drawing, particularly in its most contemporary forms. The aim of this group exhibition is to show how contemporary drawing, in its broadest sense, develops and reinvents itself in response to this two-hundred-year-old invention.

In an age when photography is the source of the majority of images, some artists maintain a disturbing proximity to these source images(Daphné Le Sergent), right down to the most faithful replica or translation. The result is incredibly photogenic drawings, raising doubts as to whether they are graphic or photographic in nature. But why "waste" so much time reproducing a snapshot? The transfer of the photographic image into a drawing is above all a process of uncovering: the document becomes a veritable surface for exploration, to be scrutinized, to be delved into in depth, to be "transmuted", as Jean-Olivier Hucleux puts it. While the draftsman tends to disappear in the process of restituting the image, he reveals and intensifies photographic clues - detail, grain, texture, surface, materiality, tactility - while giving the image a new duration. Through a historic work by Olivier Hucleux and other previously unpublished or emblematic works(Mireille Blanc, Éric Manigaud, Célia Muller), the exhibition aims to make this "graphitized becoming of the image" sensitive, to use Jean-Christophe Bailly's expression about the transition to drawing.

The photographic image can also be distanced through various graphic transposition processes: blurring(Léa Belooussovitch), defocusing, "blind" transcription, superimposition, association or confrontation(Fabienne Ballandras).

These visual shifts give rise to new focus, perceptual blurring (to the point of illegibility or abstraction) and open up critical points of view based on pre-existing photographic images, notably media images ("photo-choc", from photojournalism, but also from photo captions) or historical archives. Drawing thus confers new materialities, visibilities and temporalities.

By presenting complex photo-graphic devices(Nicolas Daubanes), interactive installations(Jérémie Setton) and in-progress, photosensitive works(Pascal Navarro), the exhibition also explores, through drawing, the processes and principles of the photographic: latent image, revelation, image fixation, reversibility, reproducibility, negative/positive, photosensitization, imprint, photogram. Through these experimental works, drawing itself becomes photographic.

Historic pieces, emblematic and experimental works, new productions and those reactivated for the Drawing Lab will make up an itinerary structured around three axes - Devenir graphité, Mises au point and Image latente - through the dialogue of works that will echo each other throughout the exhibition [photo]graphies.