Roger Catherineau
Photogram, c.1957 - 1958
Vintage print, made by the artist by the artist, 30 × 39.8 cm, artist's stamp
on the reverse, Inv. RC2010001, unique pieces
© Roger Catherineau. Courtesy Les Douches La Galerie.
Photogram, c.1957 - 1958
Vintage print, made by the artist by the artist, 30.4 × 39.8 cm, artist's stamp
artist's stamp on reverse, Inv. RC2010003, unique piece
© Roger Catherineau. Courtesy Les Douches La Galerie.
La photographie hors la loi
From 1948 onwards, Roger Catherineau's photographic work has been constructed as a quest for experimentation.
Rejecting any notion of representation of the real, he elaborated images that were non-referential, turbulent and most often abstract. Developing the notion of "productive transformation", he wishes to compose from scratch the image he has of an object, and not to reproduce it.
It is thus without any golden rule but according to his instinct that he discovers then he discovered and perfected the methods of development and printing, to which he added overprints, solarizations, turns and other chemical manipulations. At the beginning of the 1950s, he made the photogram his process of choice. A technique of contact photography without a camera, the photogram allows Catherineau to compose his works with only the light and the imprint of the object. Detached from the first generation of experimental photography of the 1930s, he does not practice the photogram as an automatic as an automatic jet, but as a demanding and mastered technique. He destroyed all the prints he considered minor or unfinished or unfinished prints as he experimented and in the latter part of his life, keeping and in the latter part of his life, keeping only works of great intensity.
For a ppr oc he, Les Douches la Galerie has chosen a selection of unique photograms from Roger Catherineau's archives, representative of his of his technical virtuosity and his great freedom of experimentation.
Presented in Paris for the first time since the Centre Pompidou exhibition L'invention d'un art, 150e anniversaire de la photographie in 1989, his remarkable work redefines the limits of the photographic medium.
Roger Catherineau trained in drawing and painting at the École du Louvre and at the École des Arts de Paris before beginning his photographic practice. Disappointed by laboratories, he develops and prints his own photographs. Very quickly, he developed an abstract expressionist practice, and in 1955 he was invited in 1955 to participate in the great exhibition Subjektive Fotografie 2 in Saarbrücken. His work was also exhibited in France, Belgium and Germany and Germany, and published in numerous international magazines and compilations.
His photographs are in the collections of the Musée National d'Art Moderne, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Folkwang Museum in Essen (Otto Steinert collection).
Les Douches La Galerie
Since 2006, Les Douches la Galerie has been promoting historical and contemporary photography and contemporary photography, with a particular focus on documentary photography photography, formal experimentation and current artistic proposals artistic proposals that question the boundaries of the medium. À through more than sixty exhibitions and a rich collection of nearly 2,500 photographs, Les Douches la Galerie offers a vast selection of works of works from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day, with a constant concern of excellence in printing.
Les Douches la Galerie, 5 rue Legouvé — 75010 Paris, France.
