Jean-Michel Fauquet Climbing the invisible

«The sparse morality of the world is the effort it may be making to become the sun again. [Everywhere a ray knocks at a dark door.

Cézanne

They come from somewhere else, they come from afar, they appear in the secrecy of daily practice, through roughs, through sketches, by intrusion, like dreams produced without one’s knowledge... The drawings of Jean-Michel Fauquet then become cardboard sculptures and appear in his photos in the form of objects like the poetic milestones of a creative night, of "another scene" (eine "andere Schauplatz") as Freud defined the unconscious in his book "The Interpretation of Dreams". A scene that is active, productive and open but whose access is unknown, unexpected, dreamlike, and elusive. Also Jean- Michel Fauquet is always alert, never ambushed. He lets himself be surprised. The shapes are enigmatic, so he tames them by sculpting them and then staging them in a fragile and evanescent theatricality. A photograph opens up its destiny. But to "kill the image", as he puts it, and "return it to the mysteries of the invisible", he works on the print, overworks it in wax, in oil and with highlights of paint. A new world emerges. This world contains certain surrealist and Dadaist connections, but it is singularly weighty. “Things are serious, so you have to ascend,” he says. To gain height perhaps but above all to give weight to a form. And this weight is hybrid: it appears in two dimensions in the photograph but is, in essence, a three-dimensional space. With him, photography contains the sculpture and seems to aspire to liberate it towards forms that are conducive to touch, to the experience of bodies, to materialised intensities. In this sense, the work of Jean-Michel Fauquet is related to that of the American artist Richard Serra and to his monumental sculptures which are volumes of feeling; heaviness in equilibrium. Jean-Michel Fauquet, for his part, sculpts objects in an out-of-time space, their imaginary density acting as centres of real energy. "I'm making signs for the theatre of your life," he says, adding that his photos show what you bring to them, even without you knowing it. They indeed have the power of revealing, of apparition. Several experiences have given Jean-Michel Fauquet's world its junctions with the invisible. In his childhood in the Béarn province, there were Spanish refugees fleeing the Franco dictatorship on foot, suddenly arriving from above, on the mountain ridge of the Pyrenees. Most significantly, there was this boarding school near Bordeaux where discipline served as the educational ideal. You had to defy risks and dangers to get out of the dormitory at night, go meet in the attic with a few teenage comrades and, there, see the unhoped-for appearing: freedom. It was materialized by the grace of a rudimentary object from the beginning of photography, the so-called "printing frame". It is a small instrument in which to wedge a piece of silver nitrate photo- sensitized paper, expose it to light and wait for an unexpected shape to appear. Coming from the light. The visual freedom experienced in this constrained environment imagination around real life and unknown around the desirable. This is the path to art. Jean-Michel Fauquet's destinations are vast. However, its practice requires the customary because it uses the cumbersome equipment of the beginnings of the history of photography, the camera, the bellows ... But the customary certainly does not prevent the cosmic. Jean-Michel Fauquet surveys its geometries and restores certain lively and ethical measures. Because his photographs are a way of fighting against stagnation. It offers the heaviness of possibilities of inspiration, therefore of a flight towards creativity. "Human work is to rebuild yourself forever," he says. His works tell of its pangs and impulses.

Annabelle Gugnon

Annabelle Gugnon is a psychoanalyst and art critic. She has worked as a journalist for Beaux-Arts and is a regular contributor to Art Press.

*Joachim Gasquet, «Cézanne», ed. Encre Marine, 2002.