The Odd Geometry that is Time
Camila Belchior
São Paulo-based, Edouard Fraipont produces a series of phantasmagoric photographs which explore re-conceptions of body and self. Through negotiations of time and light inherent to the photographic medium he creates an enquiry in to the ways in which a being can distance itself from its existence as a unit.
Fraipont works with alternatives of a being’s existence on paper. These beings are captured specifically through photography and bound directly to correlating mathematical symbols, which he uses to distinguish and name his pieces. He states that "in all the images a single being is photographed."
Being one [1] makes use of the photographic register in order to distance itself from a determinate unit, reflecting itself in other possibilities of being. Other images are entitled Being other [-1], Being null [0], Being part [1/2], Being multiple [2] and Being indeterminate [X].
In light of this the series of otherwise encrypted titles become clear. The first number is always the point of departure, so 1, the second the new being and third, a catalogue reference number. In light of this, 1/0/20, where the bodily figure is replaced by a circle of light standing out of the black background can be understood as a null being.
All the re-conceptions of self have, as a point of departure, one unit that reconfigures itself through the photographic medium only to exist in this dimension "giving itself to paper," to reference Rosalind Krauss. Fraipont studied the work of American artist Francesca Woodman closely. His current investigations draw and expand on similar questions, exploring the confines of their medium as well as the subject.
1/X/03 remits directly to a series of photos by Woodman taken in Providence, RI, circa 1976. Fraipont depicts a ghostly figure appearing from or disappearing into a patched cement wall. The being at hand is camouflaged, fused with its environment. A being that is neither clearly being nor clearly wall, an entity that schizophrenically asserts and negates itself on paper, Being Indeterminate [X] as the title implies. Fraipont takes the essence of indeterminacy a step further as he pictures this body as a number in a mathematical equation Ö
1; where the body is 1 and the beams of light is Ö
. This operation results in 1 and alludes to the inability of a truly successful operation outside itself, since this being can only exist within and is indebted to the confines of its being.
Technically, Fraipont makes use of little more than a flashlight, his own body and a slow shutter speed. As in a ritual, he draws with light through the air, around his own figure, collapsing time and matter through the lens in a quest for reconfigurations of self, attempts at different beings available only within what Woodman referred to as the "odd geometry that is time." His earlier works tend to be in indeterminate settings, transgressing to more urban references and finally in the most recent images, inserted in a landscape.
Being Other, or -1, brings to light a refreshing debate on an old feminist discourse, which berated the female body as second, other and in the shadow of the male. In decades gone by this discussion has still echoed but Fraipont’s multi-armed male nude being in 1/-1/101 asserts how unappealing such theories can be in the 21st Century. The body here is always seen in light of one reference and is made of radiance but its gender has not become a central factor in its isolation, working more as a trope of its reconfiguration, permitted before camera. Fraipont manages through his works to be at the same time, pragmatic, mystical and continually captivating and triggers both eye, mind, body and self.
