Artist: Alix Cléo Roubaud

With Si quelque chose noir Galerie Buchholz devotes the first exhibition in Germany to Canadian-born artist Alix Cléo Roubaud (1952-1983), curated by Hélène Giannecchini. A photographer and writer, Alix Cléo Roubaud developed a practice of photography that was at once experimental and radical. Having studied the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, she sought to push the medium of photography to its limits.

Working primarily in a bathroom darkroom in her apartment at 64 Rue Vieille-du-Temple in Paris, Roubaud developed experimental printing techniques, producing high-key prints built up through multiple exposures, abstract manipulations of light, extensive dodging and burning, the use of what she called her “pencil of light”, and, more rarely, colored pencil, staining, and tinting. She destroyed her negatives, writing in 1979 that “a negative should be kept only for as long as the result of its development retains something of the living memory of the intended image.” Each print is therefore unique.

At the heart of the exhibition is her major series “Si quelque chose noir“ (“If Something Black”), the work in which she reaches the height of her art. This body of work unfolds as a meditation on the finitude of existence and on the manifold possibilities of the photographic medium.