Waiting for Batut

Drawing on Arthur Batut’s body of work, Jean-Gabriel Lopez has developed a series of works that explore the making of images, their materiality, and the enduring relevance of photographic experimentation. The starting point for this research is the portrait-type, a process devised by Batut in the late nineteenth century that consists of superimposing multiple portraits to produce the average image of a group. Revisiting this protocol today using Batut’s original glass negatives, Jean-Gabriel Lopez opens a dialogue with Batut’s work that extends far beyond this singular experiment. Photographs of stacked glass negatives, works derived from the manuscript of The PortraitType, Punctuations, and La Marianne are among the works that freely expand upon Batut’s experimental universe. Each explores a different question: the construction of images, the materiality of photography, and the processes of accumulation, repetition, and transformation.

Jean-Gabriel Lopez, Six femmes de Labruguière, 2022 - Courtesy of the artist and the gallery