Taking pictures of places of power, one at 121 Boulevard Haussmann and the other at 126 Rue de l’Université in Paris.

Taking pictures of these empty places, bringing to light the different strata that live in them and that are revealed to us like memories in the making.

No dramatization of these momentarily abandoned spaces devoid of their function and their use, just capturing what makes them « places of power ». All we can see is silence and absence, power seems to be lacking. Eric Aupol’s photographs reveal the backstage, the theater of power while it is slumbering.

Eric Aupol has always used photography to show us what cannot be seen with the naked eye. The geometric strictness of the setting shows both the reality and the spaces, like paintings that reveal the successive memories of these places charged with history and representations of power. The velvety photographic texture, the subtle play of reflections and light give an incredible esthetic quality to the whole of this new series.

An impression of distance, in what could only be the topography of the space, is given by the angle of the shots often taken directly facing the camera. The scale is not immediately given to the viewer, perhaps underlining the theatricality of the places and the shootings.

When Eric Aupol wants to describe reception areas, passageways or workspaces, these ordinary places, where everything suggests that people only pass through or occupy them in a very temporary way, he chooses fragments, details, places of silence, of memories, places « after » as well as places « before ».

The past of these visited places, has no reality apart from when it is forcefully recalled by someone, and, by becoming the present, it’s as if it had always been there. The traces captured in these photographs are like the testimonies of past and present events in these places, but they will never be the last …

* First sentence of Alain Robbe-Grillet’s film by Alain Resnais, Last Year at Marienbad

Eric Aupol has already highlighted in his previous series the atemporality of places and vestiges of time: Sarlat (sculptures in abandoned crypts) Clairvaux ( abandoned cells) Paris Les Halles (dehumanized basements) and, more recently, Vitae Nova and Liangzhu Project (ghostly presence of communities on the margins)

Unlocated, his new series is made in a place that can be defined as an airport. Taking advantage of a diffuse light from the sky that gradually disappears in a sea of clouds, and playing with existing reflections, or duplications of architectural elements, which highlight the aseptic structures of these transit or waiting rooms, Eric Aupol explores here his favourite themes: the bodies inhabiting spaces, the immobility of time, distance from reality, or even the surrendering of any thought.

Always at a distance from the bodies photographed, and taking advantage of the paradox of these bodies that inhabit these temporary spaces, Eric Aupol succeeds in assembling the story, by constructing a mode of representation of time that here is considered as a surface to be explored. (In)temporal space and physical space are intimately linked in each photograph.

By going to the end of the  » Jetée  » Unlocated-Temporary Space opens up a large number of possible futures.

Known for his work about darkness and light in spaces and architecture, the French talented photographer Eric Aupol focuses for the first time on the remnants of a genuine figure of the early twentieth century: Gaétan Gatian de Clérambault.

Clérambault was a famous psychiatrist (he will be the mentor of Jacques Lacan) and a photographer. He also taught the art of drapery at the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris. As Chief doctor at the Infirmerie Psychiatrique Spéciale de la Préfecture de Police de Paris he had the opportunity to study numerous cases of mental disorders such as erotomania. He also developed a theory regarding some women’s erotic passion for fabric such as silk. The maréchal Lyautey asked him to establish a modern psychiatric facility in Morocco. Clérambault lived in Fès (1918-1919) where he took no less than one thousand photographies  all of which are drapery studies. He committed suicide in1934 at the age of 62.

This strange and mesmerizing exhibition is a tribute to Clérambault. It embraces four aspects of his achievements : The Studies of bodies and draperies are reminders of his classes at the Beaux Arts. Le quartier du Maristane is the Fès hospital  where Clérambault worked. Les pages tableaux and Les objets-outils.

The series « les espaces » (the spaces) marks a new step in the pursuit of Vitae nova, a project Eric Aupol started three years ago; (Laureate of la Villa Médicis extramural)

Accomplished in different European countries (Spain, France, Austria…), this series concentrates on staging areas, spaces of life or of work of migrants living in Europe, that the artist also photographed against the light (backlighting).  Spaces that seem at first glance meaningless, lifeless, framed on the threshold of description, but where, little-by-little, our gaze detects a certain nostalgia, a softness caused maybe by the physical absence of man.

This form of intimacy with the photographed inside space, both familiar and anonymous, conjugates with the silent withdrawal the photographer is wonted, evacuating every form of expressive pathos and of every narration.

In this treatment – more abstract than in the previous series (Clairevaux, Saissons…), quasi pictorial – as a result, nothing is ever called in a unequivocal way; And, like a signature in the work of Eric Aupol, the light plays a major role, impregnating this places, characterized as ordinary, of a pictorial and nagging warmth.