Useful Lies

The artist's collodion process helps to visually convey the feeling of being caught between two forces: the drive toward perfection and the desire to embrace flaws.

By using an older form of technology, French artist Eric Antoine strips away modern-day conceits in the quest for simplicity, solitude, and core truths. The works speak to the passage of time but also to a sense of timelessness. Useful Lies brings together several series among the last he produced. Aside from a single cardboard box in Les Intrus - a series that highlights the human body and the fragility of shelter - nothing in the photographs dates them. And yet, his framing and cropping are entirely modern, subverting any suggestion of nostalgia. These are not attempts to replicate nineteenth-century photographs but rather forays into unchartered territory that use the past to draft new stories.

The collodion process also helps visually convey the feeling of being caught between two forces: the drive toward perfection and the desire to embrace flaws. More specifically, Antoine is drawn both to German New Objectivity of the 1920s, with its rejection of Expressionism, and to the movement known as pictorialism. His medium dovetails with his interest in New Objectivity by allowing for great precision and very fine detail.

At the same time, the process is highly pictorial in that the artist essentially paints the glass plate with a sensitive coating, which pools and drips and must be controlled. This tension between exactitude and imperfection opens up the works, creating scenes that are both true to nature and evocative of their own realities.

About the Author

Eric Antoine was born in 1974, in Audincourt, France. Before devoting himself to his art, Antoine worked as a journalist for a number of years. First, he became famous for his photographic work in the skateboard world. Since 2010, he has devoted himself to ancient photography, using the technique of wet collodion on glass. Obsessed with the passage of time and the artistic and existential quest for simplicity, he applies this ancient process of rare finesse to contemporary photography. His art is an intimate and highly personal project, one that is impossible to separate from his life.

His works opened the doors of galleries and museums to him, and, in 2015, he entered the collection of the National Library of France and he self-published his first monograph « Together alone ». In the US, he is represented by the Dolby Chadwick Gallery, in San Francisco.