Frédérick Carnet — À propos — Slash Paris

Exiting the matrix of determinacy, Frédérick Carnet and the existential image.

Frédérick Carnet’s asceticism, like all others, first requires a purification phase. Get out. No more stifling. What stifling? The dreamed life, bound to disappoint, sooner or later. And for what? For life itself.

This collection of photographs unsurprisingly opens with a rite of passage, a crossing. A man, who appeared vanquished in the few laconic photographs of the introduction, hidden under a hoodie, square and immobile with his face against the wall, lets go of his idiosyncratic beaten-down posture, and reveals himself in broad daylight, in the great outdoors. The striking image of this exit is as laden with meaning as ever, to the point of almost being cliché. Here is a man, Frédérick Carnet himself, right in front of us; he just went through a circular stone opening, spared by erosion in a mountainous rift, a hole, as it were, and finds himself outside. Note that the image is thus framed, as if the artist had used a remote shutter switch or somebody to help him take his self-portrait. We, the spectators, see him in front of us, but he is already on the other side of the image, through the looking glass. It is as if, during the mechanism of birth, the matrix, the uterus, had eyes to see the child being ushered out of the vagina; and we know that, albeit intuitively, without fully being able to explain it. At last his life, and therefore life itself, can start.

What could basically be said about this man who went to the other side, is that he is finding himself again. Period. He simply had to cross the bridge. He simply had to confront the vertigo of a face-to-face with his self. A heroic act inasmuch as it required accepting to let go of a lot of baggage. This collection of photographs, which tracks the photographer’s journey through life itself, beyond the purification phase, only speaks of this: a man of integrity, who reaches the most elemental reality in the world, to finally know how to fit within it, body and soul. Empty places follow foggy places, places of solitude follow places whose paths we tread for ourselves; the light is feeble and we feel our way around these lands of uncertain tomorrows, but it’s worth it. There is truth at the end, without a doubt. We sometimes meet bodies in those places at the edge of places, the body of a woman, the lover, most likely. But those figures contort in ways that only ever say again and again: how can we find and maintain our fulfillment in this world?
Chronicles of an absolute? A physical crossing, a symbolic crossing. This indefatigable and unyielding work of redemption, carried out with the camera at the ready, is a strong harbinger of rebirth. In other words, farewell to the weapons of an ordinary and well-regulated life, and welcome to an existence encapsulated in images that bear witness to the perfect presence. At last I have found it! I place in the image something better than the image itself, void of all pretence: me.

Paul Ardenne (writer and art historian)