Archives

Gérard Rancinan

La Trilogie des Modernes
09.28.12 - 10.21.12
Exhibition — les Abattoirs, Musée – Frac Occitanie Toulouse

Gérard Rancinan
Le Banquet des Idoles, photographie (2012)

Photo : Nicolas Brasseur, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012

Gérard Rancinan

La Trilogie des Modernes, extract, photographic series (2012)

Photo : Nicolas Brasseur, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012
 

Gérard Rancinan
Le Banquet des Idoles, photograph (2012)

Photo : Nicolas Brasseur, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012

Gérard Rancinan

La Trilogie des Modernes, extract, photographic series (2012)

Photo : Nicolas Brasseur, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012

Gérard Rancinan

Le Radeau des Illusions, photographie (2012)

Photo : Nicolas Brasseur, Le Printemps de Septembre 2012

Born 1953 in Talence (France), he lives and works in Bordeaux and Ivry-sur-Seine (France).


History, to contemporary taste

 

Considered a major photographer, Gérard Rancinan defines himself as an “alert witness to the metamorphoses of humanity.” Aged only fifteen, the young Rancinan entered the photography department of the major regional newspaper Sud Ouest (Bordeaux) as an apprentice, and after three years in the darkroom he emerged in 1971 as the youngest photojournalist in France. He has photographed the great and the good, from Pope John Paul II to Yasser Arafat. His photographic “sagas” illustrating the evolution of modern society have been published in magazines such as Paris Match, Life Magazine and The Sunday Times. Since the turn of the century, Rancinan’s work has been seen on the contemporary art scene, where it is aesthetically quite at home (Urban Jungle at Espace Cardin, Paris, 2000). In 2009 his photos were shown at the Palais de Tokyo (Paris) and in 2012, among others, at the Milan Triennale and Galerie Valérie Bach in Brussels. Passionate about life, history and motorbikes, the artist’s relation to time – so fundamental in photography – is not unrelated to his passion for biking. One day he was in the passenger seat of a car, on an assignment to cover local events with a colleague, when a Harley-Davidson drove by on the right. He just managed to capture it on a Polaroid before it sped out of sight. Here was a founding experience of photography’s unique capacity for vivifying, rather than freezing time in the process of passing.


Rancinan is an engaged photographer: he photographs his contemporaries. For “History is Mine!” he is appropriating, among other works, the famous Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix, that icon of the republican ideal. Deeply rooted in history, Delacroix’s canvas, which was shown at the Salon in May 1831, reminds us what happened after Charles X and the Prince de Polignac called into question the fundamental principles of the 1789 Revolution: they sparked a fresh revolution in Paris, and in three days the Bourbons had been deposed.


In Delacroix’s painting, the crowd is converging towards the beholder, brandishing weapons: a working class girl wearing a Phrygian cap embodies both revolt and victory. As Malika Dorbani has written, “the painting bears witness to the last stirrings of the Ancien Régime and symbolises freedom and revolution” – both political and pictorial. Rancinan’s La Liberté Dévoilée (Liberty Unveiled) replaces Delacroix’s figures with contemporary figures but retains a similar global dynamic. The scene is trashy, crepuscular, it speaks to us of battles that may be less noble but seems to say that, whether veiled or not, liberty remains a vital need, and that we must follow where it leads, again and again.