WATERWORKS

In his artistic practice, Jean-Vincent Simonet pushes the boundaries of the photographic medium and develops procedures to alter images and transform the photographic surface. Drawing inspiration from both pop and punk, with several masters of Japanese photography among his key influences, Simonet’s approach to photography is instinctive, leading him to build up an impressive and varied collection of images, a veritable archive of his passions nurtured over time (urban scenes, nocturnal reminiscences, floral arrangements, printers at work, and female performance artists during breaks, to name a few).

Between June and September 2021, Simonet hand produced 2,376 reinterpretations of images from this corpus, each 32 × 44 cm (12.6 × 17.3 in.), on a large-format inkjet printer at the Fouquet Simonet printing firm in Bourgoin-Jallieu, near Lyon. The creative process developed by the artist for this project involved using the machine in a manner contrary to its intended purpose. He entered false settings and used a waterproof and non-tearable synthetic paper normally unsuited for this type of printing. As some of the ink on the paper’s surface remained very wet upon emerging from the printer, Simonet applied a range of drying techniques. He varied the drying intensity and duration, then rinsed off the excess pigment, altering the result with each action. Each Waterworks book in this series brings together a unique set of sixty-six reinterpreted images from the corpus, assembled and bound by hand at the Reliure du Centre bindery in Limoges.