In January 2018, Arnaud Baumann’s work has pride of place in Paris, through two simultaneous exhibitions devoted to him. Brought together like a diptych’s panels under the title Total Baumann, these two exhibitions constitute a dive into the work of a photographer who has cast an eye over the world and tried to capture the mystery of our souls for four decades.
Don’t trust the camera which to him is just an instrument. This photographer is like a painter or an artist who draws: he doesn’t “reproduce” reality; he doesn’t “capture” the real; to speak correctly, he doesn’t “record” anything. He imagines. Then he dances with this imagination and swirls it around until it rises into his vision. This photographer is just as much an alchemist as a painter: he turns his gaze into a melting-pot and from the very matter of the world, he extracts the power of the image, like pulling a star out of chaos. For Arnaud Baumann, this is a vision that slides like water from one eye to the other, or which crosses the hearts with the speed of fire. It’s no longer an image, it’s powder.
Arnaud Baumann has reinvented his art uncountable times. Like some painters and designers, he puts everything back into his work, not just his photographic work, but the relationships between the frame of his vision and the world’s range. To the point where you can practically guess the date of a Baumann photo from its contours and its colours, its corners and its depths. Throughout his life he has alternated posed photos with spontaneous photos, in a way that the two are constantly feeding themselves, the one off the other; the spontaneous pictures are the sketches for the posed photos; his posed photos are the preparations for his spontaneous photographs.
And in the spontaneous photos, some are so sophisticated that you would say they are posed: the BNF and the Villette at the end of the 90s, or even the Animaux of 1994, putting themselves in front of the camera like stars in the process of playing the animals! Finally there are the series which mark his life as an artist, like the Papes ou des Montagnes Sainte-Victoire; the nudes in Carnetd’Adresses; the wrinkled faces and luminous smiles of L’Âge du Siècle; the AutoSportraits where the cars resemble characters from fiction, full of the smiling roundness of American comics; the animalistic outbursts of stars turned into “patients” locked up in Chambres Blanches; the baptisms in Eau Secours; the cut-up bodies shown like works of art in Excentricités Ordinaires; or even the producers and actors “shown” in imaginary settings of Projections Privées.
Among his most important series, the most recent, Artistes Peints, has a special place. For this, Baumann invented a projection system that enabled the photography of painters and draughtsmen, tattooed with their own works, transformed by their own style, their profiles created in the same way as their frames. The Artistes Peints are not only reflections on the artist’s physique transformed in the crucible of their work, but also meditations on the way photography connects a being with its evolution, the way in which photography can act as an “assembly point”, in the shamanic sense of the term, between the body, the soul and the spirit. While we are in Baumann’s photo, we are not “dislocated”; we are “on the right track”; we are going forward to our fulfilment and our deliverance.
Because Arnaud Baumann’s photographic work is not only a shamanic voyage, it is also a quest, a search for “totality”. Total Baumann is the name of the place for which the follower is searching. It is the place where the face of a man, a star and the world become One. In a face, all the movements of the soul. In a star, all the expressions of the body. In the world, all the labyrinths of the intelligence. And what these photographs expect of us is that we be at the highest levels of our totality. Arnaud Baumann’s photographs demand that we be “Total Us”: face, star and world. The subject of Arnaud Baumann’s work, the weaving that he has produced through his craft for forty years, is the realised man.
Pacôme Thiellement
Pacôme Thiellement is a writer and videographer He likes Hara-Kiri, Bazooka, Zappa, Twin Peaks, Lost, Sohrawardi and the Bhagavad Gita. He has written essays on pop and gnostics, in particular: L’Homme électrique (MF, 2008), Tous les chevaliers sauvages (Editions Philippe Rey, 2012) and Pop Yoga (Sonatine éditions, 2013He has just published La victoire des sans roi (PUF, 2017).
Total Baumann
« Rétrospective » – Photographs from 1974 to today
11th, 12th and 13th January 2018
Les Showrooms du Marais
118, rue de Turenne
75003 Paris
France
« Ombres et Lumières » Visions intérieures, images intimistes
From 9th January to 3rd February 2018
Galerie Corinne Bonnet
Cité artisanale, 63 rue Daguerre
75014 Paris
France
