Jean-Michel Fauquet's Primordial Photography at Galerie Pierre Brullé

Jean-Michel Fauquet's exhibition at Galerie Pierre Brullé in Paris, from April 11 to May 15, 2010, explores the origins of photography through constructed scenes. Fauquet built a primitive camera at age seventeen, initiating a practice that avoids capturing existing reality. Instead, he constructs secret realities using drawings, painted cardboard assemblies, and compositions meant to be 'seen.' His works include staircases leading nowhere, imaginary facades with dark vaults, shroud-like garments, obscure forests, draped figures, and crumpled papers. The images evoke hidden figures lost and found within an architectural narrative, guided by an angel announcing the night of time. Fauquet's art resides in the anticipation of 'something about to happen,' a transformation where the artist becomes a passerby, seer, and inspired being. A portrait shows a man with aphasia trumpets, eyes closed, listening to apocalypses or the Last Judgment. The montage oscillates between origin and end of time, with black surfaces restoring light. Critics reference Steichen, Turner's fogs, Goya's black paintings, and Bernanos's 'Under the Sun of Satan.' A backward glance at a misty landscape evokes the motif of Mouchette's crime in the optical apparatus of our fears.