Autoportrait. Photographie Originale de l'artiste

Original black and white photograph created and printed by Marc Trivier.
Silver gelatin print unsigned, 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 make new prints 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 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 just as much as the various alterations that photographs undergo when they are exhibited: "In the boxes, the prints buckle, 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 the multiple, this intervention by the artist throughout 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 recroppings. We find in his work the same square format that 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 pose. It is this light, linked to Trivier's medium and which obsesses him, that gives his works the aura that makes them so present:
"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).

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 the slaughterhouses which he places alongside the 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 and the Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne, the Casino in Luxembourg, the Maison Européenne de la photographie in Paris devoted an important retrospective to him in 2011.