“Winner of the 2017 BMW Residence in GOBELINS, Baptiste Rabichon proposes a practice of photography that gives new meaning to the idea of a material that carries content. His work is a set of sensations and impressions. His discourse is built through the use of complex manufacturing tools and protocols, mixing new technologies and old techniques. They are strange and rare these unique objects, which must be called photographs, with various shapes, partial views of the Garden of Hesperides. They are the result of a specific action on the French photographic scene, an experiment where fantasy meets admiration for the great ancestors. In this setting, it is possible some days to see Fox-Talbot or Renger-Patzsch. They walk there and offer some useful advice to this young gardener, this man is a flower.
Everything is now plant in a stable world where no proposal seems incongruous. There is nothing magical about this transformation. With perseverance, and a great acuteness, Baptiste Rabichon seeks other elements to talk about reality. In a directionless photograph, one gets lost in a jungle where man is no longer distinguished from nature. The search for harmony, an idea that was fleeing some time ago, presides over the realization of the individual as a complete being. The demands of reason only intervene in the manufacturing process. As a good gardener, that is to say, a good craftsman, Baptiste Rabichon is passionate about the best procedures. Analogue and digital, everything is mixed in a single concern, the requirement to give at this time a new sensitivity, an animist prescription, living forms of matter. Beauty, another idea long rejected, appears here in the form of a love union, reconciliation between beings, objects and plants. ”
François Cheval
