Eric Baudelaire Unfinished Business

The practice of French artist Eric Baudelaire examines the influence of public images on our experience of social and political events and the impact of representation on our sense of time and history. Employing allegories of movement to investigate the relationship between images and knowledge, Baudelaire’s exhibition presents video and photo-based artworks realized over the last three years.

In his 2007 series Circumambulation, Baudelaire investigated the cyclical relationship between image and event, navigating around the space left empty by one particular event that unfolded on September 11th. Fabricating images and narratives that tended towards the real in works including Sugar Water (2007), Baudelaire created false documents that mime known events as a device to decode the fabrication, dissemination and consumption of images.

In his Anabases (2009 –) series, the movement is one akin to wandering; an uncertain journey into the new that ultimately, only in retrospect, is transformed into a return home. A further development of Anabases sees Baudelaire reversing his strategy of creating fictions that appear to be documents, instead using real documents to extract fictions; as is the case with The Makes (2009). Baudelaire’s gestures consist of the assembly, reproduction or re-contextualization of these documents, opening up new narrative spaces and initiating original forms.