Portrait de Michel Foucault. Photographie Originale de l'artiste

FOUCAULT Michel Portrait of Michel Foucault. Original artist's photograph.

Large original photographic portrait in black and white by Marc Trivier.
Original unsigned silver print, like most of Trivier's works.
Small tear to upper edge.
A handsome original silver print proof by the famous Belgian photographer, one of the most secretive contemporary artists, who - despite early international success - preferred to limit his output to preserve the coherence of his oeuvre. Marc Trivier doesn't do after-prints of his old portraits, and in any case, the paper he used for printing is no longer sold. The artist "prints his images himself on Ilford baryta paper, devoting several days of work to each. He pays special attention to rendering the whites, contrasted with unusually dense blacks. A Marc Trivier print is like none other. When he does agree to exhibit his images, he suspends them in self-made stainless steel frames, giving the paper the freedom to live its life" (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 changes that the photographs undergo when they're exhibited: "In the boxes, the prints buckle, but so what: it's the photographer who's giving rise to this sort of accident" (Claire Guillot, "Les face à face sans échappatoire du photographe Marc Trivier [The inescapable encounters of the photographer Marc Trivier], Le Monde, 2011). Marc Trivier has a particular sensibility for the material aspect of his work. Though photography essentially relies on the multiple, this intervention by the artist in the entire process of creation gives these prints an autobiographical air.
  

Whether photographing artists, mad people, trees, or abattoirs, Marc Trivier approaches all his subjects with a gaze that is as precise as it is intense.
 

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

The beauty that emanates from his photos comes from this nakedness. There is no retouching and no reframing. One finds throughout his oeuvre the same square format underlined by the squares of the negative that Trivier leaves on his images. This frame traps our gaze in the photographs where the artifice of color is rejected for a cutting black and white. All artificiality gone, we are faced not with the arrangement of a subject but a presence exacerbated by the radiant and singular light, testimony to a lived moment and not a pose. It is this light, tied to the photographic medium, that unites Marc Trivier's various series:

 

"Marc Trivier's photographs write a tragedy of light, which does not welcome beings - humans, trees, or animals - but rather burns them before disappearance" (Xavier-Gilles in Le Monde Libertaire).

It is also this tragedy of light, freed of all artifice, that gives his works the air that makes them so immediate. This "burning" of the light throws us back into a real moment, to the "that happened" of Barthes (Camera Lucida, 1980): 

 

"Of thirty-five years of photography, of various obsessions, perhaps this is what is left: a singular way of recording the burning of the light, carried through one image after another, in a succession of propositions that seem to resemble one another and yet each is just as singular as the fraction of the moment to which it refers" (Marc Trivier).

"Photography says only one thing: 'that happened.' You can only record what has been. If there is a tragedy to it, it is in this" (Marc Trivier)

Warhol, Foucault, Beckett, Dubuffet, etc.: the most famous writers and artists posed for Trivier. At the same time, the artist was just as interested in the margins of society, to what people did not wish to see. He therefore photographed the mentally challenged and abattoirs, images he then contrasted with celebrities. From the late '80s, his work has been unanimously acknowledged and he received 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, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris also devoted an important retrospective to Trivier in 2011.
 
 

The photographs of the famous figures of his era that Trivier took do not seek to show the public face of these artists. Taken head-on and looking into the lens, they give us an image of intimacy:
 

"...instead of being just another portraitist for writers and artists, he marginalized himself by his actions: under the pretext of adjustments, he made his models wait; he made them pose for several minutes, which gives them a weary air. He may have been waiting for them to behave more naturally. And so we are faced with Francis Bacon balancing precariously, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet or even Michel Foucault more or less squeezed into their chairs. Intimate images" (Sylvie Rousselle-Tellier, "Une image de fatigue chez Marc Trivier [Marc Trivier's Tired Look]", Marges 2004).

Photographed in their personal worlds, mostly in their bedrooms, the subjects let themselves go, are no longer in charge of their image. The lack of balance that results reveals the fragilities of these strong characters and allows Trivier to reconstitute the unity of the private body with the public work.
 

"I was reading Genet ; for me Genet was letters on a page. And then one day I saw a photo of him and there was some kind of a break. How was it possible that these symbols were also an actual person? Taking a portrait is reconciling the name and the face. " (Marc Trivier).

More than a portrait, each photo is the witness of an exchange between the subject and the artist, of a moment from real life. The presence of the photographer is palpable in each portrait Trivier takes:

 

"What interested me was not simply capturing a body or a face, but that specific situation where one is in the process of taking a photo of another" (Marc Trivier).