ENTROPY
preface by Etienne Hatt
In Vincent Lemaire's studio, as I saw it, there is an enlarger, a red safelight bulb, a LED lamp taped to the ceiling, boxes of silver gelatin photographic paper but, at first glance, no camera; nor are there any art history or photography books, but rather astronomical images, a world map showing primate families, and a list of prehistoric “Venuses,” classified first by age, then by date of discovery. There are large cardboard boxes marked “Tubes,” broken neon lights, and chunks of asphalt. There are Petri dishes and glass plates on which strange whitish rhizomes spread. There are small pulleys laid out on a table like specimens in a natural history museum, pieces of string, and strips of lead. Above all, there are countless framed photographs, often small, mostly wrapped or stacked on top of each other, more rarely hanging on a wall pocked with tiny holes.
If I linger on Vincent Lemaire's workspace, it is not for the pleasure of an inventaire "à la Prévert", but to give the simplest idea of the complexity of his photographic practice. For, his work does not consist of taking snapshots of the outside world, but of generating, in a studio resembling both a photographic darkroom and a scientific laboratory, his own images that construct their own narrative and temporality.
In this laboratory, Vincent Lemaire multiplies experiments. Yet he cannot really be considered an experimental photographer. He does not play with light and chemistry to push the boundaries of the medium, as many of his contemporaries do. Instead, he employs two main processes: on the one hand, the photogram—negative impressions of objects placed directly on light-sensitive paper; on the other, conventional analog photography, but most often of his computer screen, through which he collects and retouches images. The first, archaic in both the historical and elementary sense, was developed by the inventors of photography and revived by 20th-century avant-gardes; the second is characteristic of his generation, which grew up with digital technology and does not hesitate to combine it with analog practice.
If not strictly photographic, what kind of experiments are these? The titles of the works he has produced in recent years—Emergences, Matriarchal Emergences, Matriarchs, Lithopanspermia, Entropy—offer a clue. What drives Vincent Lemaire is the question of origins, of development, and of life's eventual decline. To take just the last two titles: “lithopanspermia” refers to the hypothesis that extraterrestrial rocks may have seeded life on Earth, while “entropy” in physics denotes imbalance, degradation, and dissipation. Drawing on such scientific theories, Lemaire gives them poetic form by combining elements drawn from his own personal periodic table.
The first of these elements is the slime mold, or “blob,” a unicellular organism that is neither animal, nor plant, nor fungus, and which has the remarkable ability to double in size in a single day. The artist cultivated it in Petri dishes, let it spread across glass plates, and produced photograms from it. The second is the prehistoric Venus. These original depictions of the human—specifically female—body have long been associated, through their morphology, with fertility and maternity. The third is the neon tube, which Lemaire has used extensively for some fifteen years. He breaks them and uses the irregular fragments to make photograms that reveal textures invisible to the naked eye. The fourth is asphalt, which he collects from the street, using fragments as they are or placing them on photographic prints in progress to partially obscure landscapes apparently untouched by human presence.
In Lemaire's personal periodic table, neon and asphalt may seem out of place, even incongruous. Yet as witnesses of our industrial and technological civilization—which, as the culmination of our origins, may also represent humanity's final stage—they also embody a specific state of energy and matter. Rendered obsolete, emptied of gas, neon tubes are no longer sources of light but inert solid matter, just as asphalt, derived from hydrocarbons, is a residue of fossil energy. Neon and asphalt, like the “blob” and the “Venus,” are elements that Lemaire, in a way reminiscent of Arte Povera and Joseph Beuys, exploits for their material, energetic, and symbolic charge.
By thus moving beyond a literal approach to images and objects, Vincent Lemaire is able to bring these elements together—sometimes associating them, sometimes confronting them—within compositions or what he calls “wall installations.” The first groupings bring together images of the same nature: arranged in sequences or layered on a single sheet, the “blobs” of the Emergences series record their growth; arranged as a tree, the “Venuses,” transformed into Matriarchs, create a potential feminine genealogy. The second type confronts elements of different kinds: neon photograms and asphalt fragments in the fragile balances of Lithopanspermia; "Venuses" and neons in the series Matriarchal Emergences; and finally, a landscape obscured with asphalt, a "Venus", and a "blob" in the composition Entropy. What interests the artist in these juxtapositions is the sense of time they establish. Whether linear or cyclical, they sustain a constant tension between past and present, grounding the vast story of life that Vincent Lemaire tells us.