The Self-Fulfilling Image aims to create a photograph that is both the result and the cause of its own existence, bringing to life this photograph through a performance. Conceptually, the project takes its cue from the idea of the “self-fulfilling prophecy”, which creates the conditions that makes it become true. At the same time, this photograph takes its inspiration from the “one image story” in the manner of the Renaissance tradition depicting different sequences of the lives of Biblical figures as a visual narrative for a complete story. The Self-Fullfilling Image merges both propositions into single project: a large photograph placed into a specific venue and brought to life through a performance.The “hero” of the photograph is the artist, Nicolas Grospierre. The Self-Fullfilling Image appears at first glance like a simple urban landscape photograph, but is in fact an intellectual game and a commentary on his own situation as an artist in New York. The photograph depicts a wide-angle landscape of a street of Chelsea seen from a bird’s eye view. Chelsea as the heart of the NY art scene. In the first sequence, Nicolas Grospierre is seen walking in the street carrying a huge framed photograph. This photograph is the same one that the viewer is looking at, and which is currently being described. In a second sequence, further down the street, the artist is meeting with someone, a gallerist, to whom he is presenting the photograph. The third sequence represents the opening of Nicolas Grospierre’s exhibition in a gallery: the photograph hangs on a wall of the space, and Nicolas is in discussion with a person, possibly the gallerist. And, finally, in one of the windows of the street buildings, one can distinguish a reflection of a person taking a photograph from the other side of the street: it is the artist taking the picture.The performance is what is actually happening in the third sequence of the photograph, i.e. a real opening of a show, in a Chelsea gallery, with the actual photograph hanging on the wall of the gallery where it is seen hanging in the picture. The actors of the performance are the viewers that came to the opening: they are part of the picture which they are looking at.
Kunstkamera is a photographic installation consisting in an imaginary collection of photographs, shown in an especially designed hexagonal room, and creating a visual and intellectual game for the viewer.The title, Kunstkamera, refers on the one hand to the “Wunderkammer” and “Kunstkammer” of the Renaissance: cabinets of curiosities and art, typologies of extraordinary exhibits aiming at showing the world in miniature. On the other hand, the Kunstkammers were also paintings representing these very cabinets, where the painter would include hidden meanings only readable by the initiated. The Kunstkamera installation contains both the collection of curiosities, in the form of various photographs, and the photograph representing the collection, thus creating a mise en abyme, with the photograph of the collection inside the collection, which is itself represented in a photograph, and so on. Practically, the installation consists of a hexagonal room, with two entrances opposite each other. The room is thus divided in two: the photographs are symmetrically organised with respect the line created by the two entrances.
Each half room contains two side walls, on which are hanging the photographs of the collection, and a central wall displaying the image representing the room itself. The game begins when the viewer gets acquainted with the photographs, the way they are organised on the walls, and what they represent. As in the “kunstkammer” of old, this one contains all sorts of visual and narrative riddles. The topics of the photographs are the keys to these riddles. On the one hand they refer to tradition of the “kunstkammer”, the very fact of collecting, and the narcissistic obsessions related to it. On the other hand, they refer to my own private obsessions as a photographer: my tendency to create symmetries and repetitions, and to use a creative instrument which I felt prisoner of, which is the idea of series in photography.
The very fact of taking pictures in series is a form of collecting and also an obsession, and Kunstkamera is an attempt to embody this idea of series in photography, and ultimately exceed it. That is the reason why the central photograph representing the collection shows different images than those physically hanging on the walls: these are all series whose subsequent images appear only in the mise en abyme of the central photograph. A final and invisible motif consists in that most of the photographs are hoaxes, either visual (what they show is impossible) or narrative (the description I give them is false). Mystification, through digital manipulation, has indeed become an integral part of photography today, and it seemed necessary to me to include some in Kunstkamera, as ultimate riddles for the viewer to discover.
The Picture Which Grows, a project carried out in the apartment of photographer Tadeusz Sumiński is an attempt to confront, in the shape of a photographic installation, the ideas of tidiness and untidiness, the static and the dynamic, order and entropy. It is also a clash of the order informing the archive of Tadeusz Sumiński and a method aiming to disturb this order.
The Library project is not the representation of a specific library, but rather an attempt at representing the very essence of the idea of a library. It is loosely inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ novel The Library of Babel, where the author describes the universe as an “infinite and cyclic” library. The project is thus an attempt at showing, through a photographic installation, the library as an infinite gathering of books, but that can be contained in a single book.
If one assumes that a library has three main functions, that is to gather books, to stock them and archive them, and to make them available to the public, it is possible to phrase the following statements. First, as a library is, by nature, a place where books are gathered, it is potentially infinite, because books, and thus knowledge, knows no boundaries and is constantly expanding. And second, a library may contain a book on libraries, or even the list of all books in that particular library, which means that a library is simultaneously the container and the content of the same subject matter
The Library is a photographic installation developed upon the above-mentioned propositions. In its simplest form, the installation is composed of six elements (photographic objects and installations) laid down in a circle. These elements are the following:
A fake book, i.e. a photographic object imitating one of the books of the library, life size;
A fake bookshelf, i.e. a photograph imitating one of the bookshelves of the library, life size;
The Never-Ending Wall of Books, i.e. a photograph of a bookshelf placed in a light box and shown in mirrors, in order to create the illusion of a wall spreading endlessly in all directions;
The Never-Ending Corridor of Books, i.e. two photographs of bookshelves placed in light boxes and shown in mirrors, in order to create the illusion of a corridor sprawling endlessly;
The library building i.e. a light box representing a miniature library;
A real book, which is the alter ego of the fake book, where one can find a photograph of the miniature library building.
In this setting, watching the installation is like a backward tracking, starting from a book, where each additional step backward places the viewer in a higher position, and ending where it has started.
Phoenix is a paradoxical book. As the mythical bird after which it is named, it is born again from its very ashes. It is a book which contains at the same time the documentation of its own inception and destruction. What is more, it is its very destruction which forms the basis of its own existence.
The collection, which grows is based on the idea that a series of photographs should be organised in such a way that each successive photograph in the series is the result of the previous one and would be impossible without it. I have in the past already used this concept for two works: The picture, which grows (2011) and The house, which grows (2012). Metaphorically, one could compare this idea to the growth of a tree: first comes the trunk, then the branches, and then the leaves. And it is impossible for the leaves to grow with branches, not the branches without the trunk.
In The collection, which grows, this concept is used in its simplest form, and yet one which is perhaps the most demanding. The first image of The collection which grows (photo #0) represents an anonymous grey space, unidentifiable. This photograph forms the basis onto which the series will grow. Indeed, the second photograph (photo #1) represents a gallery space, where photo #0 is hanging on the wall. The third photograph (photo #2) represents another gallery space, where photo #0 and photo#1 are hanging next to each other, and each next picture reproduces the same procedure. One can see in each next photograph how the series, the collection of photographs is actually growing, as they hang side by side.
Still, this concept is most demanding, technically, as it requires each time more wall space. But it is also demanding because, for the series to grow, the project need to be shown in different but real (i.e. not staged) exhibitions. In other words, the longer the series, the more the project will have been invited by curators to different exhibitions, and the more notorious it shall be. This is something the author of the project has no control over.