Portrait de Willem De Kooning. Photographie Originale de l'artiste

Large original black and white photographic portrait by Marc Trivier.
Original unsigned silver gelatin print, like 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 print new copies 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" ["Marc Trivier and the tragedy of light"] 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: "Dans les boites, les tirages gondolent, mais qu'importe : le photographe affectionne ce genre d'accident." ["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" ["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 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.

"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, everything, every 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 no retouches, no 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 makeup of color is rejected for an incisive black and white. All artificiality having disappeared, we are not faced with the staging of a subject but with 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:

"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 only welcomes beings - men, trees or beasts - 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 which 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 great personalities of his time that Marc Trivier creates do not seek to show the public image of these artists. Taken face-on, with a gaze directed toward the lens, they show us an image of intimacy:

"(...) au lieu d'être un portraitiste d'écrivains et d'artistes parmi tant d'autres, il se marginalise par son dispositif : sous prétexte de réglages, il fait attendre ses modèles, il les fait poser plusieurs minutes ce qui leur donne un air las. Il attend peut-être un comportement plus naturel. Et on se retrouve face à Francis Bacon en équilibre précaire, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet ou encore Michel Foucault plus ou moins tassés sur leur chaise. Des images intimes." ["(...) instead of being a portraitist of writers and artists among so many others, he marginalizes himself by his approach: under the pretext of adjustments, he makes his models wait, he makes them pose for several minutes which gives them a weary air. He perhaps awaits more natural behavior. And we find ourselves facing Francis Bacon in precarious balance, Samuel Beckett, Jean Dubuffet or Michel Foucault more or less slumped in their chair. Intimate images."] (Sylvie Rousselle-Tellier, "Une image de fatigue chez Marc Trivier" ["An image of fatigue in Marc Trivier"], Marges 2004).

Photographed in their personal universe, most often their bedroom, the subjects abandon themselves, no longer control their image. The resulting imbalance reveals the fragilities of these strong personalities, and allows Trivier to restore the unity of the intimate body and the public work.

"Je lisais Genet ; pour moi Genet, c'était des lettres sur un livre. Et puis un jour j'ai vu son portrait, il y a eu comme une fracture. Comment était-il possible que ces signes soient aussi quelqu'un ? Faire un portrait, c'est ressouder le nom et le visage." ["I was reading Genet; for me Genet was letters on a book. And then one day I saw his portrait, there was like a fracture. How was it possible that these signs were also someone? Making a portrait is reuniting the name and the face."] (Marc Trivier).

More than a portrait, each photo is the testimony of an exchange between the subject and the artist, of an instant of real life. The presence of the photographer is felt in each of the portraits that Trivier creates:

"Ce qui m'intéressait, ce n'était pas de photographier simplement un corps ou un visage, mais cette situation particulière qui est quelqu'un en train de faire la photo de quelqu'un d'autre." ["What interested me was not simply photographing a body or a face, but this particular situation which is someone in the process of taking a photo of someone else."] (Marc Trivier).

The generation of abstract expressionists of which Willem de Kooning is part experienced great media coverage. The group is primarily known through its male figures, Pollock, Rothko, or Franz Kline. These painters play on their masculinity to put forward an action painting where the body enters the canvas. De Kooning does not hesitate, in the manner of Picasso, to have himself photographed shirtless in his studio or in full struggle with his canvas. However, Marc Trivier does not show him to us in this public image. He manages to circumvent it to show us a painter slumped in his chair, perhaps tired from the work accomplished, who emerges from the arena of painting that critic Rosenberg spoke of ("A un certain moment, les peintres américains [...] commencèrent à considérer la toile comme une arène dans laquelle agir, plutôt que comme un espace dans lequel reproduire, recréer, analyser ou "exprimer" un objet réel ou imaginaire. Ce qui devait passer sur la toile n'était pas une image, mais un fait, une action." ["At a certain moment, American painters [...] began to consider the canvas as an arena in which to act, rather than as a space in which to reproduce, recreate, analyze or 'express' a real or imaginary object. What was to pass on the canvas was not an image, but a fact, an action."] 1952).