ART

ART PHOTOGRAPHY WORKS /// TRAVAUX DE PHOTOGRAPHIE D’ART

THE HEALER /// LE GUERISSEUR
(2005-2009, à Copenhague, Danemark)

L’exposition contient 20 images aux formats 50 x 75 cm et 30 x 45 cm, accompagnées d’une projection audiovisuelle de la série entière comptant 71 diptyques.

(see english version in menu to the right)

CLICK HERE to see THE HEALER /// LE GUÉRISSEUR (série photographique)

Un photographe Français (né en 1971) nous entraine dans ses errances solitaires à Copenhague, au Danemark. La ville Européènne qu’habite JM Babonneau et qu’il investigue en photographie depuis 6 ans. 50.000 images passées en revue, 71 diptyques réalisés. Un journal intime polymorphe dont la série d’images documentaires nous emmène dans le territoire de la fiction sous la forme dialectique qu’impose le diptyque. Images spontanées croisent parfois le regard d’images construites.

Photographe, mais aussi conteur d’histoires et conceveur de livres photographiques, JM Babonneau dans sa série The Healer /// Le Guérisseur nous présente un travail d’immersion dans une culture étrangère, en l’occurence, la culture danoise. Parallèlement, ce travail révèle doucement une quête de la beauté dans les rencontres fortuites, les visions furtives pêchées dans la trivialité de l’aquarium culturel quotidien de JM Babonneau, qu’il pique parfois de son ironie.

Une fin de tunnel et un mare à café. Une amie photographiée à l’hôpital pour un traitement contre le psoriasis et une couverture de magazine mise en scène avec un œuf dur ouvert aux morceaux éparpillés de sa coquille bariolée. Deux publicités danoises, l’une montrant une jeune femme blonde ouvrant les jambes pour exhiber la culotte d’homme qu’elle porte, l’autre une publicité recadrée d’un couple de retraités souriants pour le parti d’extrême-droite danois, Dansk Folkeparti. Trois générations sur roues, et la trace d’un dérapage dans la courbe de la route bordée de pelouse. Un homme masqué d’une couverture de magazine de mode. Un ordinateur portable montrant un paysage de nuit éclairé au réverbère et le fantôme hurlant et flou du photographe sortant du même paysage, référant au tableau Le Cri d’Edvard Munch. Un timbre postal nazi figurant une gravure d’Hitler dans le creux d’une main et une décharge publique dont les palissades sont dépassées par une montagne de corps métalliques.

Des photographes comme Robert Frank, Wolfgang Tillmans et Jim Dine ont épanoui l’expression subjective de JM Babonneau et l’ont doté d’une liberté formelle, à contre-courant de l’école photographique influente de Düsseldorf, où le couple Bernd & Hilla Becher, par exemple, a prôné un extrême systématisme au travers de son œuvre photographique documentaire précise, austère et protestante. Des auteurs comme Henry Miller, Paolo Coelho et Milan Kundera lui ont confirmé cette nécessité intrinsèque de la condition d’artiste de cultiver l’originalité de son point de vue, ceci impliquant aussi des periodes de doute et de germination de la conscience.

Les échos du choc culturel de l’artiste immigré présentant la sobriété minimaliste-protestante plutôt factuelle du nord versus l’exubérance baroque-catholique plutôt conceptuelle du sud. L’intention subversive de JM Babonneau dans ses travaux sous l’alias de Better_World_Inc. voudrait en fin de compte nous ramener un peu changés de cette odyssée, et nous encourager vers la réconciliation entre l’autochtone et l’étranger, le professionnel et l’amateur, entre l’artiste et l’homme. Une œuvre habitée.

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Le dispositif d’exposition des images sous la forme de 20 à 30 tirages (selon les dimensions du lieu) aux formats 50 x 75 cm et 30 x 45 cm, s’assortit d’une diaporama de la série complète comptant 71 diptyques, avec atmosphère sonore.

Recent comments on 3 pictures from the series The Healer, in 2008, on x1.com

–oOo–

/// PREVIOUS SERIES /// SERIES PRÉCÉDENTES ///

YOUR BRAND NEW ANCESTRAL EYES
(1999-2002, in Reykjavík, Iceland)

Cette série photographique réalisée à la fin d’un séjour de 3 années à Reykjavík, en Islande, contient 44 doubles pages en polyptyques d’environ 130 images. Les dimensions du prototype livrèsque: X = 14 cm, Y = 9 cm, Z = 2,2 cm.

CLICK HERE to see YOUR BRAND NEW ANCESTRAL EYES (série photographique, © 2002)

Better_World_Inc. was born with a camera. And Mother Universe has been through a hard time expulsing & giving birth to such sharp shape through her silent cosmo-cunt of eternity. A camera and the myth of the natural-born artist.

Natural-born foreigner & newly-graduate photographer, I went straight to cold hell after 3 years of studies at the French National School of Photography (ENSP), and one year of apprenticeship at master Lucien Clergue’s, in Arles, where Vincent Van Gogh had finished his mental trip, about a century earlier. Lucien Clergue’s portraits of Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau, which I was printing from his original vintage negatives in the atelier’s dark-room, for american art-galleries, were my first direct access to good staged portraits of artists become legend. It has been of use in my early years as portrait photographer on the wild market of images.

Fresh air! Pure water! Iceland! Reykjavík! Pretty girlfriend! Builing a nest of love in difficult conditions. Separation. Transition. Challenge. Job OK. Art experiments. Losing up academic boundaries. Alcohol and one-night stands. Growing alone. 30 years. Year 2000, a new millenium! After 3 years in Iceland, during a meditative period about my exotic life on the island, I threw this photographic UFO out of my memories & numerous archives.

I liked to collect life scenes falling into my sight and impressions, intentionally or accidentally. The corpus Your Brand New Ancestral Eyes was constructed in 2002 from a broad selection of photographs.

In this version of my icelandic works, I discarded intentionally the reputated icelandic nature marvels, in regard to the many touristic landscape picture-books available on the market and the many stereotypical images of Iceland stored in people´s fantasy. The photographer’s artistic choices led to this urban, intimate and personal work. The series layed out through the pages of a book make it a visually playful narrative of a foreign man’s existence in Reykjavík. It invites an array of images to converge and clash side by side in multi-layered pages, featuring mobile telephone screen shots of short-message-service (sms) as traces of communication with friends and local dates, some kind of diary, fashion photographs, snap-shots in bars, magic kitchen table re-constructions, urban night shots, underskirt shots and a few nudes.

Poetics, politics, erotics.

The Icelandic story has become a part of my life and constitution. This piece of Iceland I conquired, against the many dangers, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hyper-alcoholism of the icelandic weekends, the rage to win of this small society lost in the middle of the North Atlantic ocean. Their international star Björk is a mediatic myth which I slowly disconstructed in the mind of the younger artist I was back then. I realized how ridiculous it may appear to idealize a person that you see at the local boheme bar or at the only video store in town renting out VHS-tapes of films by Lars von Trier or Bertrand Blier, for example. Nevertheless, the star didn’t blend with the french immigrant artist that I was, among the icelandic artists in the city’s bars. Her talent for me didn’t rime with much empathy for the settled alien in Reykjavík. Hospitality? Would you rather go to the hospital to find such thing?

Strange chemistry. Acidic alchemy of hellos and good-byes in the village center, postage number: 101. Miðstræti 8b. I lived 2 years in the old house facing the one of Icelandic director & actor Balthasar Kormakur. There were, though, nice exceptions on my path, like Ísar Lógi, his brother Ari, and Jón, Maggi, Erpur and more at Undirtón@r, the icelandic music magazine, which I used to work for, portraying many famous local artists, like Múm, Emiliana Torrini or Ragnhildur Gísladóttir (Ragga Gisla), two of the most charming, talented and charismatic icelandic singers I’ve ever met.

My innocence, originated in my ignorance of the local “who is who”, allowed me to look at people as people, not as mediatic VIPs (medias work as a distorting filter between mind and reality). Just people. Often great personalities. I was an author meeting other authors: musicians, writers, filmmakers, all dedicated poets in one drunk-of-a-hell good life, through the wild weekends of the capital. On monday mornings, all suffered from chronic amnesia. No wonder if your newest drinking pal didn’t recognise you, when walking down Reykjavík’s main street, Laugavegur. You had 5 days again to recover your dignity through a hard working week.

I love Iceland. It treated me good & bad. Icelanders tought me a lot about daring to break static academic rules (after I had been studying 8 years at two french art-schools), allowing me to re-invent myself and confront stiff photographic genres and textures, screens, drawings, including an absurd sentence, some french inherent lyricism, spotted with down-to-earth snap-shots. Mental projections, desires and reality going hand in hand like young lovers. Both a dark and a humorous alchemy.

Tired of the alcoholic 1001 one-night stands, without finding real love, I started longing for a new horizon. Back to the continent. Ah, old and wise Europe! Airport in Keflavík. Direction: Denmark. 22nd of oktober 2002. 7:00 am. A new start is about to happen in a new nordic city. Welcome to Wonderful Copenhagen!

The Your Brand New Ancestral Eyes series start with the picture of a warehouse wearing Better_World_Inc.’s logo and the title of the series. The last double spread shows a panoramic version of this building like deserted, only a naked structure is left in place of company sign.

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As exhibition, it may look like an installation including a museum-like pedestal protecting the book, meaning the unique copy of the prototype put inside a plexiglass box, in which the book is slightly spread open. A light spot upon it. The unique accessibility to the visual content of the book would be through a video projection of my hands turning the pages, at a subjective rhythm, allowing close-ups on some pictures (existing video material from installation at the Reykjavík Menningar nótt, cultural night 2002). Use of sound undefined.

Seen retrospectively, after 7 years, the need of another arrangement of these works in 2009 is rising in my mind to match my photographic vision at this time. Upcoming art-shows will be the playground for experimenting with new ways.

–oOo–

ART WORKS 1992-2008
(in France, Austria, Iceland and Denmark)

Art-works since 1992 featuring my photographic exploration & evolution. I hope that it may give you some keys to understanding better where I am at, as an image-maker, today in 2009. Starting in 1992 with great formal unity and some systematism, to gradually blending art genres in life-like complexity researches. Reducing the world to one single systematic or dogmatic vision is not very relevant for me anymore, in my understanding of art & life nowadays, although recognition of an artist’s work paradoxically invites him/her to stick to one precise genre, whether it be a metaphysical need to stick to an artistic identity or a commercial demand from the art-market. I decided to break some boundaries and save some butterflies from my head, and maybe yours.

JMB

CLICK HERE to see my art works 1992-2007 (séries photographiques, © 1992-2007)