Hubert Marot at Galerie Anne de Villepoix

Artist: Hubert Marot

Exhibition title: GOING-GONE

Venue: Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris, France

Date: July 1 – August 2, 2017

Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Galerie Anne de Villepoix, Paris

You could see here a direct reference to Michel Foucault’s “androgynous images,” which he defined in his text called Photogenic painting, written in 1975 for Gérard Fromager’s monographic catalogue. These images combine mediums and categories, and bear testimony to the free relationship between photography and painting. Such is the very substance of Hubert Marot’s work
in his exhibition GOING-GONE. His first cyanotypes already conjugated photographic process with pictorial rendition. Here, his latest series introduces color as an element of variation, allowing a shift from negative to task. Color appears, driving the rhythm and, little by little, becomes the subject.

Around this queenImage, whose nuances vary depending on the application time of the liquid emulsion, there is a whole ecosystem of ceramics in enamel, which has also stood the test of time. They turn into solid objects a state of evolution, of degradation. Hybridity still rules, hubcaps melt and become clocks, and scooter seats, lacerated and mended, become, once hung up on the wall, a series of ancient masks.

There is then, in its very technicality, in the invariability of the dried out result, a contained and sealed process of alteration. If matter is adorned with color variations, the intention is entirely focused on time, what it allows, what it dilates, what it forgets. In this work of patience, a softening phenomenon occurs. Before it is fixed, matter has distended, like the closeup of the chewed-up chewing gum on the canvas prints, the ceramics have become limp, waiting for time to pass. A metallic structure, built like a bus shelter, hosts a looped projection of anonymous men who have the patience to rub their car’s bodywork until it shines, another reminiscence that this is all, once again, about the passing of time.

We feel like we’re in a slow motion movie, in a vinyl record set to the wrong number of turns per minute. In the seriality and repetition of the objects presented here, seats, hubcaps, images, there is the same mechanics as in the mastication of chewing gum, the same fatality, the same latency. And yet, what saves everyone from being swallowed by this great machine is, in the end, the unreproductability of this work. In “each moment in time is unique” there is “each process is unique,” and therefore each result. Repetition doesn’t rob the image of its singularity, on the contrary, it allows it to vary in its unicity through gesture, for the obsession with reproduction is also the obsession with its failure. An outrageously oiled machinery.

-Elisa Rigoulet