Palimpsest

Sébastien Capouet’s Palimpsest gathers a body of photographs taken between 2011 and 2014, in parallel with the artist’s pictorial practice. This book induces, via playful folds and successive intervals, rhythmic gestures in the reader. The principle is that of the palimpsest, in which successive strata echo both the different layers enveloping the characters staged in the photographs, and the deserted landscapes – sites of memory – in which they evolve. Within Sébastien Capouet’s oeuvre, the body of photographic images presents itself as a transitory, liminal space, as a condition for the abstraction of the painted canvas. The chosen abstraction allows the artist to concentrate the attention of the spectator on the processes at play. These processes of effacement, in his paintings just as much as in his images/photographs, depend less on subtraction than on additions, superimpositions and saturations.

Co-published with MER. Paper Kunsthalle