Engaging with Photography

Étienne Hatt

In its relationship to photography, drawing is often considered as a transfer, and the mechanical image as a matrix. Photography is therefore seen as a visual source employed with a concern for illusionism or, on the contrary, for dissimilarity. Nevertheless, a stroll through the aisles of the 16th edition of Drawing Now reveals other configurations, amongst which the combination of drawing and photography through editing, or their amplification, when one of the techniques compounds the other. Drawing and photography are mediums with their own processes, effects, histories and imaginations (one might distinguish the graphic from the photographic). Yet here, it is less a matter of pointing out their ontological proximity (the paradigm of the mark, or more concretely the whiteness of the substrate, etc.) or, conversely, their respective specificities and limitations, than of deploying the potential of the multiple modalities of their hybridisation as evidenced, amongst others, by the work of Anne-Lise Broyer (110 Galerie), Gabriel Folli (Galerie

La Ferronnerie), Corinne Mercadier (Galerie Binome), Jonathan Rosić (Archiraar Gallery) and João Vilhena (Galleria Alberta Pane). Many contemporary artists who practice drawing work from found images, photographs which are more or less ancient, vernacular or utilitarian. In an era in digital flux, where photography is revisiting its history, their interest intersects with that of photographers without cameras who seek out photographs to compose thematic collections or to intervene on them, for example using embroidery.

FOUND IMAGES

Draughtsmen have in common the long time of drawing, which contrasts with photographic instantaneity. But they are faced with two distinct paths.The first is to consider photography as an object. Drawing then underscores materiality by replicating the characteristics of the print, the sometimes crenellated edges of the paper, the traces of time, as well as the stains, the accidental folds, the alteration of the emulsions, the photographer’s stamp, the photo corners, etc. All these aspects can be found in João Vilhena’s drawings, whose illusionism aims to trap the gaze.The second path consists in considering photography foremost as an image, erasing its photographic nature. Jonathan Rosić reproduces found photographs in Chinese ink, retaining certain gestures and postures. His drawing could be described as photorealistic, if it weren’t for the fact that his ink washes literally and figuratively draw a veil over his motif, and that his use of the reserve obscures the primary, descriptive purpose of photography.

These two paths, mimetic or detached, maintain contradictory relationships to the reality of photography. Vilhena’s illusionism is only apparent, not to say suspect. Even though his work appears to traverse the history of photography from the erotic or ethnographic imagery of the nineteenth century, it would be wrong to consider it as a graphic archaeology of the medium. The artist makes too many changes to the original images, the most visible being enlargement, which monumentalises the small found prints. The most discreet are the montages of images and the additions—especially of hands in scenes of embraces—which “pervert” them

by developing the fictional potential of sometimes innocuous situations. Although the distancing, this time, has the same purpose in Rosić’s work, and although the original image is concealed, the artist does not aim to create his drawings ex nihilo by staging models. Reconnecting with Roland Barthes’ “ça-a-été” and the melancholy of Camera Lucida, the artist sees photography as proof and evidence that the “micro-disappearances” of daily life which he pursues, such as the self-absorption of a character, have indeed come to pass.

DEVICES

Beyond the resumption of images, drawing’s borrowings from photography extend to its effects and processes. As a proponent of velvety prints on matte paper, the photographer Anne-Lise Broyer began to draw on them in graphite, most recently in her series of vanities Le Langage des fleurs, titled in reference to Georges Bataille, where the drawing revives wilted bouquets. In her eyes, her graphic interventions have more to do with photography than with drawing. By its power of reflection and its luminous variations, the matter of graphite refers to the metallic medium of the early days of photography. The daguerreotype was compared to a mirror which, moreover, took on positive or negative values depending on the movement of the gaze. Vilhena, meanwhile, has reconnected with the stereoscopic view. After drawing fake ones, he has now appropriated this device, which was very fashionable in the mid-nineteenth century, consisting of juxtaposing two images of the same motif taken from slightly offset viewpoints to create an effect of relief in the observer’s eye, equipped with a stereoscope. He has trained the latter on two drawings from photographs taken by the artist of an exhibitionist neighbour on her balcony, whilst subverting the device to superimpose a second drawing on the scene, perceived in three dimensions. This second drawing, which also appears in relief, forms a target. Echoing the crosshairs of a camera, it embodies the artist’s definition of the gaze as inherently erotic.

In Vilhena’s work, photography no longer functions solely as a matrix, since the optical device creates the drawing. As we can see, the relationship between the graphic and the photographic tends to be reversed. Series of photographs by Corinne Mercadier, made from paintings on glass, consolidate this shift. Produced at very different times, they show the transition from analogue to digital photography in the relationship between the technical image and drawing. The first, Glasstypes (1987), brings together Polaroids of drawings on glass inspired by Giotto’s Annunciation to Saint Anne at the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. In front of the lens, marked by dreams and their processes, the artist orientated the glass plates in different ways, superimposing them to create images that were virtually contained by her drawings on glass. Above all, she has achieved effects of colour and matter that only Polaroid cameras and film could produce. Recently, for La Nuit magnétique (2022), she superimposed images of smoke and luminescent polyhedra onto dark, bare photographs of interiors using Photoshop. Digital photography provides her with “a poetic space very much like drawing.” Drawing and photography are thereby amplified, but the artist also presents a series of works on paper, Le Voyage intérieur (202022), which, despite its similarities to La Nuit magnétique, owes nothing, or very little, to photography.

AESTHETIC OF CHAOS

In her hybrid research between graphic and photographic elements, Mercadier uses techniques for their specific effects, expressing a paradoxical attachment to the respective qualities of the two mediums. The same cannot be said of Gabriel Folli, who pushes the hybridisation of processes and images to the point of producing the most composite drawings possible. His series Amo Bishop Roden (2022), whose title is that of a Boards of Canada song which he listened to on a loop as he was making it, includes six drawings which combine photocopies of photographs, Polaroids, an old charcoal drawing pasted on pages of an old notebook and completed by interventions in graphite, crayon, marker and Indian ink. Some of these interpret found images, as in a drawing which associates an image of the ruins of the Spanish war with portraits of Spanish children taken from photographs from the same period and drawn on the back of the page.This “aesthetic of chaos,” to use the artist’s words, is based on waste and re-use, but also on a full-scale process of visual archiving. Multiplying the journeys between the past and the present, with a mise en abyme created by the Polaroids of views from the studio or of the work in progress, this contributes to the artist’s investigation into the violence of our societies. Resumptions, combinations and amplifications of images, processes, devices and effects; illusionism, distancing or diversion; anchored in reality or tipping over into fiction; work on the surface or the exploration of strata: nowadays, photography is undeniably much more than a matrix for drawing, so much so that it surprisingly finds its place, as such, in a fair devoted to the latter medium. Engaging with photography, drawing transcends itself and reveals all its powers.

De gauche à droite from left:

Anne-Lise Broyer. Le Langage des Fleurs, pivoines, lilas, roses… 2022. Graphite sur tirage argentique on gelatin-silver print. 120 x 80 cm. (Court. 110 Galerie, Paris).

Jonathan Rosić. Untitled (Architect). 2022. Encre de Chine sur papier Indian ink on paper. 69,8 x 50,8 cm. (Court. Archiraar Gallery, Ixelles). João Vilhena. Préfiguration du dispositif stéréoscopique of the stereoscopic device