Louis Diaz. Madrid 1984

Large original black and white photographic portrait by Marc Trivier.
Unsigned original 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 create new prints of his earlier portraits, and the printing paper he used is no longer commercially available. The artist "produces 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 in the same way 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 by essence multiple, this intervention by the artist throughout 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.

« 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 photos comes from this nakedness. There are neither retouchings nor reframings. 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 do not face the staging of a subject but a presence exacerbated by the radiating and singular light, witness to an instant of life and not of posing. 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, delivered 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' "that-has-been" (Camera Lucida, 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, perhaps that's 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.' One fixes only 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 dedicates an important retrospective to him in 2011.

The photographs of the mentally ill that Trivier created during the same period were deliberately mixed with those of artists during the Parisian retrospective of 2011. Far from an attempt to oppose madness and genius, this juxtaposition was instead the occasion for questioning our gaze upon these two fantasmatic poles of the human person.
While the photographs of doctors like those of Charcot in the 19th century emphasize the illness of patients and make them pose in ways to 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 their difference. As with his series on artists, Marc Trivier steps outside 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.