Portraits de Michel Foucault. Photographie Originale de l'artiste

Set of 8 small-format portraits of Michel Foucault by Marc Trivier.
Original unsigned silver print, like most of Trivier's works.
Precious original silver 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 make new prints of his old 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 hangs 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" in Le Monde Libertaire, 2011). This "life of the paper" participates in the work just as much as the various alterations that photographs undergo when exposed: "In boxes, the prints buckle, but what does it 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 multiple by nature, 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 no retouches, no reframing. 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 do not face the staging of a subject but a presence exacerbated 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:

"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' "that-has-been" (La Chambre Claire, 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.' 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 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.



The photographs of the great personalities of his time that Marc Trivier makes 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:

"(...) instead of being a portraitist of writers and artists among so many others, he marginalizes himself through 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 waits for more natural behavior. And we find ourselves face to face with 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", 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 such strong personalities, and allows Trivier to restore the unity of the intimate body and the public work.

"I was reading Genet; for me Genet, it 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, it's rewelding 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 photographer's presence is perceptible in each of the portraits that Trivier makes:

"What interested me, it wasn't simply to photograph a body or a face, but this particular situation which is someone in the process of taking a photo of someone else." (Marc Trivier).