In 2012, at the Villa Médicis, I worked on the room as we collect it: an architecture, a terrace, a garden, skyline lines. I was bringing back some negatives that would have a...
In 2012, at the Villa Médicis, Léonard Bourgois Beaulieu worked as a guest room: architecture, a terrace, a garden, and skyline lines. He brought back negatives that would undergo a long process of development.
In 2025, the photographer found these films in a lost box. What he thought was fixed was not: for thirteen years, the image continued its chemical life. The colors moved towards ochres and gold, micro-organisms and minerals developed, some areas were abraded, perforated, sometimes literally devoured. The archive has turned into an organism, and photography into an active surface.
An essential part of the series is due to unpredictable chromatic drifts. The artist does not control these scales: after applying his photographic solutions, but also according to the state of the negative, its storage, and its internal reactions, some images slide toward burnt gold, others turn toward cold blues, as if the same place passed between two climates. These twists do not “color” the image: they signal a change of state, visible proof that the archive is still active.
This shift changes everything: the Villa is no longer just a backdrop. It becomes a place of friction between historical and biological times. In several images, silhouettes barely appear: children playing tag, washing clothes in the Hermès basin, splashing each other. A forgotten skateboard near the basin sets up a quiet anachronism; Elsewhere, a child photographs his classmate with a digital camera. In the lion loggia, a little girl starts to dance. Through these ordinary gestures, the place dispels itself from its solemnity: it once again becomes a space of use, simple, living, crossed. Their presence is fragile, almost dissolved, but it is precisely this uncertain status that makes the image: we no longer look at "what happened", we look at "what insists" despite erasure.
Each print is thus a compromise between appearance and disappearance. Whites are not lacks: they are zones of silence, gaps in memory, breaths. Attacks, deposits, accidents become the true writing of time. In the very place where the photograph claims to preserve, it shows on the contrary that nothing can be preserved intact and that memory is first and foremost a matter.
This exhibition is part of the journey Photography in Art Galleries, organized by Professional Committee of Art Galleries.
