Abattoir XI. Photographie Originale de l'artiste

Large original black and white photograph by Marc Trivier.
Original unsigned silver gelatin print, as with most of Trivier's works.
Precious original silver gelatin proof by the celebrated Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who despite early international success, preferred to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not make new prints of his earlier portraits, and the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "makes his own prints on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each one, with particular concentration on rendering the whites, in contrast with blacks of rare density. A Marc Trivier print resembles no other. When he agrees to exhibit them, he suspends them in stainless steel frames of his own making, giving free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, "Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière" in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work just as much as the various alterations that photographs undergo when they are exhibited: "In the boxes, the prints warp, but no matter: the photographer is fond of this kind of accident." (Claire Guillot, "Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier," Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially multiple, this intervention by the artist in the entire creative process gives an autographic aura to these prints.


Photographs of artists, madmen, trees or slaughterhouses, Marc Trivier approaches all these subjects with a gaze as precise as it is intense.


"In his cosmogony, each thing, each being, plant, animal or human, deserves the same respect. For all are confronted with the same iron law: solitude." (Luc Desbenoit).


The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There are neither retouching nor reframing. We find in his work the same square format emphasized by the square of the negative that Trivier leaves on his prints. This frame traps our gaze in photographs where the artifice of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. With all artificiality having disappeared we are not facing the staging of a subject but a presence exacerbated by the radiant and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of pose. It is this light, linked to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's series:


"Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, the latter only welcoming beings - men, trees or beasts - by burning them, before disappearance."" (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).


It is also light, freed from all artifices, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present. This "burning" of light brings us back to a real instant, to Barthes' "it has been" (La Chambre Claire, 1980):


"From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, perhaps this is what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, varied from one image to another, in a succession of propositions that resemble each other and yet each is as singular as the fraction of time to which it refers." (Marc Trivier).

"Photography only says one thing: 'It was.' We only fix what has been. If there is a tragedy, it is there." (Marc Trivier)



Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet... the greatest writers and artists have posed for Trivier. Simultaneously the artist is also interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the insane and the slaughterhouses that he places alongside celebrities. From the end of the 1980s his work is unanimously recognized and he receives the prestigious Young Photographer Award from the International Center of Photography in 1988 as well as the Prix Photographie Ouverte (Charleroi). After the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris devotes an important retrospective to him in 2011.
The photographs of the insane that Trivier made in the same period were deliberately mixed with those of artists during the 2011 Paris retrospective. Far from an attempt to oppose madness and genius, this juxtaposition was on the contrary the occasion for questioning our gaze on these two phantasmatic poles of the human person.


The series devoted to slaughterhouses might seem distant from Trivier's other works. However, like the insane, slaughterhouses are part of these shameful images of a marginality that we do not want to see. It is a place rejected outside the city, far from gazes, far from men. There are moreover almost never men in these photographs.
Unlike Franju's film, Le Sang des bêtes, in 1949, Trivier is not interested in the gesture of work in slaughterhouses. He captures them empty, populated with corpses or animals blinded before being led to death. The photographer draws inspiration from Bacon's painting, whom he moreover photographed in 1981, and from the latter's relationship to the body. We find all the English painter's pity for meat and animals in Trivier's series.


"I have always been very moved by images relating to slaughterhouses and meat, and for me they are closely linked to all that is the Crucifixion... It's certain, we are meat, we are potential carcasses. If I go to a butcher's, I always find it surprising not to be there, in the animal's place..." (Francis Bacon in Francis Bacon. Logique de la sensation, by Gilles Deleuze).


His photos show us beasts as martyrs like Marsyas or Saint Peter. Trivier reveals the tragedy of the body dispossessed of presence, photographing blind, dead animals, dismembered and emptied of their entrails that black and white turns to marble. But it is always man who is reflected in these portraits of soulless flesh, a man who, through Marc Trivier's silver mirror, projects himself into this blind flesh, and for an instant crosses the infinitesimal space of the gaze that separates them.


"The cows regularly photographed by Marc Trivier at the Anderlecht slaughterhouse manifest the same essence as his human faces." (Henri Van Lier "Le timbre photonique, Robert Frank et Marc Trivier," in les cahiers de la photographie 1992)