5/6/2013
Sebastien Capouet
Anyspace, Bruxelles
Palimpsest. The device for this exhibition includes paintings and photos that the artist approaches on an egalitarian level, and for which he uses the generic term Tableau.
The Anyspace Gallery is pleased to introduce the first personal exhibition of Sébastien
Capouet. The device for this exhibition includes paintings and photos that the artist approaches
on an egalitarian level, and for which he uses the generic term Tableau. His practice constantly
comes and goes between photography and painting, in a context in which both media question and
stretch the other.
Both proceed with a time of composition and a time of recording. They work according to
different modalities, but are intrinsically connected and work towards the same goal: the tableau
as a performance of sight. Sébastien Capouet approaches this visual structure as if it were the
stage and the receptacle of a series of experiences encompassing the corporeal, the visual but
first and foremost memories.
Memory as an operating machine
The elaboration of these tableaux does not come from a process of documentary investiga-
tion on a specific subject or on a determined story. They originate from the memory of a place and
the sensorial and imaginary experience it arouses: the physical confrontation with a landscape,
the symbiosis that results from it and the immaterial traces that are inscribed into memory.
The artist thus attempts a reconstitution and a modernization of the traces through different steps:
a journey, the creation of a fictional character, photographic shots, inventorying, the elaboration of
a database of images and patterns, the virtual construction of the canvas and, finally, its realiza-
tion. In both his paintings and photographs, Sébastien Capouet’s process includes a passage from
a digital form, using its potential for duplication, multiplication, malleability, and thus allowing us
to access, through technology, a deeply buried memory and imaginary.
The character inscribed in the landscape
It is therefore from this uncertain memory of the materiality of a place that the pattern of
fiction is generated : the integration of a character in a landscape and the setting up of a stage-like
device. The character is created from the costume tailored with elements gathered throughout
the journey. The character is thus given a hybrid personality, formed by assembling heteroclite
materials and textures. A composite heap sometimes even able to confer an absurd and dreamlike
side. Existing only through the photographic space, the characters are presented as immobilized
and stuck bodies, always existing in the extension of their environment.
The photography-tableau
A multitude of quick-burst photographic shots of the character are taken from different angles,
which create a consistent body of images. Some of them are carefully selected and printed. The
use of black and white photography has the property of working like a steamroller, which reinforc-
es the flatness of the image and stresses the grounding and the integration of the character in the
landscape. The distinction between different visual perspectives tends to disappear. The use of a
large format also contributes to a change of relation with reality. The captured object is stretched
and spread out into a material surface close to the pictorial space, approaching abstraction.The sharpness of the images, their pictoriality and the singularity of the frames bring a loss of
spatial and time references in which any element, animal, vegetal, mineral, the immensity of the
landscape and the tiniest details of rocks become tangled.
An elaboration of the surface witnessing a transformed visual field.
The object-book
A wider selection of images is gathered in the object-book. It originates from the intention
of sharing an imaginary breeding ground and allows a game of quasi-unlimited formal and visual
associations and combinations. It multiplies the analog bonds like a game of encounters between
things with different origins but which combine and fuse one other at their limits. Its elabora-
tion underlines temporality’s fictional development, whose duration is that of a moment invented
from mixed events and instants. Following a principle of organization through successive steps, it
allows a great diversity of formulations and gives the reader-spectator the freedom to create her/
his own fiction.
The painting-tableau
The body of photographic images calls for a process of deciphering and sedimentation.
The artist needs to absorb this flux of images and bring it towards a process of lamination. In other
words, he needs to understand the modes of perception, the ways in which each image reveals
itself, in order to catch the action regimens that they later allow to project. During a long period,
the artist built an actual inventory of pictorial signs: patterns, silhouettes extracted from photo-
graphic images, stains, prints of objects, waste and scraps, monotypes... which each at a time
are shot and confined within the computer’s space. A virtual database as ‘prophetic memory’ that
allows him to later work through the accumulation and montage.
The paintings, apparently spontaneous and as if coming from a single gesture, are actually care-
fully constructed and prepared. Before starting a tableau, Sébastien Capouet establishes a sort of
virtually constructed ‘draft’ with the help of computer software. This study is carried through with
different layers, each corresponding to an action regimen picked from the inventory.
The artist preliminarily establishes an execution protocol. The artist must be able, before execu-
ting the painting, to visualize and mime the different gestures and operations that he will have to
repeat during the successive elaboration of the tableau.
The canvases are thus painted like a palimpsest. A process of juxtapositions in order to allow the
coexistence and the concomitance of several evocations, which is a way to have memories
resurface and come back into action, to make them present. To show at the same time several dia-
chronic paintings, belonging to different steps of writing. Each step of the tableau is photographed
and recorded in progress, nourishing in turn the inventory, materializing yet again memory.
Creating an inventory to invent, painting in the aftermath.
Image: Untitled (OXO_0127.jpg), 2012, 200 x 149 cm. Ink jet on paper mounted on aluminium, edition of 3
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