François. Manage 1984

Large original black and white photographic portrait by Marc Trivier.
Original unsigned silver gelatin print, as with most of Trivier's works.
Precious original silver gelatin print by the renowned Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who despite early international success, chose to limit his production to preserve the coherence of his work. Marc Trivier does not make new prints of his older portraits; 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, allowing free rein to the life of the paper." (Xavier-Gilles, « Marc Trivier et la tragédie de la lumière » ["Marc Trivier and the tragedy of light"] in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work in the same way as the various alterations that photographs undergo when 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 » ["The inescapable face-to-face encounters of photographer Marc Trivier"], Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensitivity for the material aspect of his productions. While photography is essentially multiple in nature, this intervention by the artist in the entire creative process confers an autographic aura on these prints.


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

« Dans sa cosmogonie, chaque chose, chaque être, végétal, animal ou humain, mérite le même respect. Car tous sont confrontés à la même loi d'airain : la solitude. » ["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 photographs comes from this nakedness. There are no retouches, no reframings. We find in his work the same square format underlined 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 do not face the staging of a subject but a presence heightened by radiating 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:


« Les photographies de Marc Trivier écrivent une tragédie de la lumière, celle-ci n'accueillant les êtres - hommes, arbres ou bêtes - qu'en les brûlant, avant disparition. » ["Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, which welcomes beings - men, trees or beasts - only by burning them, before disappearance."] (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).

It is also this 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's "that has been" (La Chambre Claire, 1980):


« De trente-cinq ans de pratique photographique, d'obsessions, c'est peut-être ça qui reste : un mode d'enregistrement singulier de la brûlure de la lumière, décliné d'une image à l'autre, en une succession de propositions qui se ressemblent et pourtant chacune est aussi singulière que la fraction de temps auquel elle renvoie. » ["From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, this is perhaps what remains: a singular mode of recording the burning of light, declined 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).

« La photographie ne dit qu'une chose : « C'était. » On ne fixe que ce qui a été. S'il y a une tragédie, elle est là. » ["Photography says only 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 mentally ill and 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 mentally ill that Trivier made during the same period were deliberately mixed with those of artists during the 2011 Parisian retrospective. Far from an attempt to oppose madness and genius, this juxtaposition was on the contrary an opportunity to question our gaze on these two fantasmatic poles of the human person.
While photographs by doctors such as those of Charcot in the 19th century emphasize the patients' illness and make them pose in ways that render their symptoms visible, those taken by Trivier do not seek to make the madman a simple witness to a pathology, nor even an "other," someone who would be characterized by his difference. As with his series on artists, Marc Trivier breaks away from the system of posing which is an artifice to reach the humanity of his subjects. These men have a powerful gaze and a strong presence that contradicts their anonymity.
Like the artists, whose mystery they seem to share, the "madmen" question our own presence.