As part of the Bicentennial of Photography, the Drawing Lab—a space dedicated to experimentation and the promotion of contemporary drawing—is presenting a group exhibition that highlights the connections between photography and drawing.

While Nicéphore Niépce invented the photographic image in 1826, his contemporary Henry Fox Talbot also believed he had discovered, in photography, a “faithful pencil” capable of naturally capturing the interplay of light and shadow. He also referred to photograms—light-sensitive prints obtained through direct contact—as “photogenic drawings,” marking the early stages of photography as a process of fixing and momentarily obscuring light.

While photography is now recognized as one of the major artistic media, this group exhibition aims to highlight the close dialogues it maintains with contemporary drawing, in all its forms, and how drawing has evolved and reinvented itself in unique ways in the shadow of this two-century-old invention.

In an era when photography and post-photography are the source of most images, some artists maintain a disconcerting closeness to these source images, going so far as to create exact replicas or the most faithful translations. In this way, they create drawings of incredible photogenic quality, raising doubts as to whether they are graphic or photographic in nature. But why “waste” so much time redrawing a snapshot? The transfer of the photographic image into a drawing is, above all, a process of revelation: the document becomes a true surface for exploration—to be scrutinized, delved into deeply, and “transmuted,” according to Jean Olivier Hucleux. While the artists tend to step back from the process of recreating the image, they reveal and intensify the photographic cues—details, grain, texture, surface, materiality—while imbuing the image with a new sense of duration and tactility. Through a historic work by Jean Olivier Hucleux and other more recent works (Daphné Nan Le Sergent,

(Mireille Blanc, Éric Manigaud, Célia Muller), the exhibition brings to life this “graphic transformation of the image,” to borrow Jean-Christophe Bailly’s phrase regarding the transition to drawing.

The photographic image can also fade away through various processes of graphic transposition: blurring (Léa Belooussovitch), “blind” transcription, superimposition, association, or confrontation (Fabienne Ballandras). These visual shifts give rise to new focal points and focal lengths, as well as perceptual distortions—to the point of illegibility or abstraction—and open up critical perspectives based on photographic images, particularly those from the media—

“shocking photos”—taken from photoessays—but also from their captions. Through drawing, these images thus take on new forms, visibility, and temporalities.

Furthermore, by presenting complex photographic works ( Nicolas Daubanes’s incandescent photograms, an interactive installation by Jérémie Setton in which viewers reveal the image in two ways, and Pascal Navarro’s photosensitive works that gradually appear), the exhibition uses drawing to explore the founding principles of photography: latent image, development, fixation, reproducibility, negative/positive reversibility, photosensitization, and imprint. Through these experimental works, drawing itself becomes photographic.

Historical pieces, iconic and experimental works, new productions, and installations revived for the Drawing Lab come together to form a journey through works that echo one another, organized around three themes—“Becoming Graffiti,” “Focus,” and “Latent Image.”

In the exhibition *Éclipse*, drawing is thus revealed through the medium of photography.

Anne Favier

Curator of the exhibition