DELPHINE BURTIN: Sans Condition Initiale

Through the object constructions and photographs in her installation Sans condition initiale [With no initial condition], Delphine Burtin’s pursues her conceptual investigations of the leitmotiv of the “visual accident.” Present in all her images, she views this discordant motif as a way of attracting our visual attention and sowing doubt into our perception of reality.

In this extremely controlled series contrived in studio, the artist deepens her explorations of the limits to and the ambivalence of human understanding.

Supremely economical in terms of technique and colour, she amasses, aligns, overlaps, and arranges ordinary objects — glass, fly-swat, sphere — that she characterises as “pieces of world.” From these “existing visual fragments,” Burtin adumbrates an entirely reconfigured visual semiotics.

By hijacking objects from their everyday use and reassigning their significance, the arbitrary combinatory game generated by the artist results in a surprising photographic language, in which objects we thought we knew become unfamiliar and the incongruous associations they set in train undermine our conventional representations.

If Delphine Burtin’s works have often been discussed in terms of still-life photography, in the present case it would be more pertinent to talk of the photography of sculpture. Sans condition initiale investigates
the interaction between objects transformed into sculptures, sculptures that subsequently morph into photographs, and photographs that revert back to the status of sculptural objects by occupying all three dimensions of space.

Texte: Emilie Delcambre, Musée de l’Elysée