Photographie de la citadelle de Dinant et de la collégiale Notre-Dame de Dinant. Photographie Originale de l'artiste

Large original black and white photograph realized and printed by Marc Trivier.
Unsigned silver gelatin print, like most of Trivier's works. Unique proof printed by the artist.

Precious original silver gelatin print 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 print new copies of his old 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 print by Marc Trivier 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 as much as the various alterations that photographs undergo when they are exhibited: "In 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 about multiples, this intervention by the artist in the entire creative process confers 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 retouches 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. 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 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 welcoming 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 refers us to a real instant, to Barthes' "that has been" (Camera Lucida, 1980):


"From thirty-five years of photographic practice, of obsessions, perhaps this is 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).

"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 equally interested in the margins of society, in what men do not want to see. He then photographs the insane 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 devoted an important retrospective to him in 2011.