The work of Vincent Lemaire does not consist of taking snapshots of the outside world, but of generating, in a studio resembling both a photographic darkroom and a scientific laboratory, his own images that construct their own narrative and temporality.

In this laboratory, Vincent Lemaire multiplies experiments. Yet he cannot really be considered an experimental photographer. He does not play with light and chemistry to push the boundaries of the medium, as many of his contemporaries do. Instead, he employs two main processes: on the one hand, the photogram— negative impressions of objects placed directly on light-sensitive paper; on the other, conventional analog photography, but most often of his computer screen, through which he collects and retouches images.

If not strictly photographic, what kind of experiments are these? The titles of the works he has produced in recent years—Emergence, Matriarchal emergence, Matriarchs, Lithopanspermia, Entropy—offer a clue. What drives Vincent Lemaire is the question of origins, of development, and of life’s eventual decline. Drawing on scientific theories, Lemaire gives them poetic form by combining elements drawn from his own personal periodic table.

The first of these elements is the myxomycete, or “blob,” a unicellular organism that is neither animal, nor plant, nor fungus, and which has the remarkable ability to double in size in a single day. The artist cultivated it in Petri dishes, let it spread across glass plates, and produced photograms from it. The second is the prehistoric Venus. These original depictions of the human—specifically female—body have long been associated, through their morphology, with fertility and maternity. The third is the neon tube, which Lemaire has used extensively for some fifteen years. He breaks them and uses the irregular fragments to make photograms that reveal textures invisible to the naked eye. The fourth is asphalt, which he collects from the street, using fragments as they are or placing them on photographic prints in progress to partially obscure landscapes apparently untouched by human presence.

Rendered obsolete, emptied of gas, neon tubes are no longer sources of light but inert solid matter, just as asphalt, derived from hydrocarbons, is a residue of fossil energy. Neon and asphalt, like the “blob” and the “Venus,” are elements that Lemaire, in a way reminiscent of Arte Povera and Joseph Beuys, exploits for their material, energetic, and symbolic charge.

By thus moving beyond a literal approach to images and objects, Vincent Lemaire is able to bring these elements together—sometimes associating them, sometimes confronting them—within compositions or what he calls "wall installations".

(Text by Etienne Hatt)