He is saying that the ball is a symbol for woe, and that the stones evoke hard times. Then there are the books, whose layered, leafy structure is a means of making time perceptible, both its heurs and its malheurs. When a book is new, its fresh stack of pages conjures something positive; yet when they are stiff, curled up and shriveled, they are charged with negativity. Éric Antoine is speaking to me. He shows me the meaning of each thing, piling them upon a table in the little room inside his house that functions as a studio. He speaks, and through the clarity of his voice, the most ordinary objects are transformed into symbols. He stacks them up, and suddenly, before my eyes, a volume surges forward: precarious but solid, it was not there before, and yet it has the air of some ancient monument. Just a moment ago, this table was an ordinary table, a trivial object in an unremarkable place. But now there’s something here, materializing through Éric Antoine’s words and his swift hand, so confident and so precise as it composes. Yes, this is a world, that is to say a life—Cerveau, a brain—which has just come into being and now waits for its creator to become its photographer, presently.
Presently, instead of setting up his ULF (ultra large format) camera, I see that he is rummaging through shelves to find a missing object. As it turns out, this object is a jar, but he is only interested in what is inside: sand. I do not need him to explain the reason why: it is, of course, time—without a doubt, it is time, its work and its creations—that preoccupies this man. There we go; it’s ready now. Or rather almost ready, because he has suddenly realized that he has forgotten something: string, a bit of white and then of black, which he uses to reveal links between specific objects, like a common thread uniting separate moments in a single life. All of this, the words he speaks as though they were obvious, the way he moves with such certainty of purpose, confirms that what I see here is the fruit of long labor. Éric Antoine speaks to me of rationality, and as he does, the things he names and touches become symbols for the very acts of touching and of naming. He is right: none of what is here, not one of the meanings that these things condense, is here by accident. One cannot become a creator of symbols by improvising, but only by means of careful study and experience. Study because, as the artist knows, there are old traditions—like the one that led me to automatically associate sand with time—which have long presided over the pictorial syntax between seeing and knowing. To be specific, Éric Antoine has spent a lot of time with seventeenth-century Dutch painting. Had he been a painter—a possibility that casts its ever-present shadow over his photographic work—he would have been a still life painter. Because his focus is on silent life. Or because, to go further, this art is his rightful place, where things are paired with recognition of their vanity: where it is possible to summon, in one photographic act, both presence and absence.
A symbol is a device for collecting, as its origins in Greek attest: ‘to throw together’. It restores a connection: binding the visible to the invisible, the present to the absent, what is here to what has gone. Éric Antoine became an artist in the wake of grief, and he has forged his own language piece by piece, mixing impressions with shapes taken from his own experience, with meanings drawn from his life. This is how you forge a symbol: by boiling down lived experience into a shape determined by necessity. Antoine’s choices are never anecdotal, his works are not riddles waiting for translation. For example, when he says that stones signify illness, he is revealing one of the ways in which he came to place his tragic experience inside a thing. This placement turned it into something, halfway in between relief and preservation. All of his work strikes this balance, teetering on the same brink: he had to make something out of loss, to give form to an absence, to preserve its power from vanishing into the void, to find a place between oblivion and memory.
For this, there is photography. Éric Antoine’s uses wet collodion, a nineteenth-century technique that he uses without the least nostalgia. Watching him start to set up his shot just as, earlier, I watched him build Cerveau, I understand why he wanted me to see him at his work. From the placing of a ball upon a table to the apparition of an image upon a plate of glass, following immersion in a bath of silver nitrate, it is the same lived experience that is offering itself up, as something to be both seen and felt. This experience is made of time and rituals. Here, just as before, every gesture is a repetition of the same gesture made many times over. The mighty, unpredictable collodion must be tamed. In order to accomplish this, the timer reigns supreme, enforcing its uncompromising laws along this loop between laboratory and studio, a path which will, perhaps, lead to an apparition. Time is decidedly the master, here: the artwork’s subject, as well as its condition. Throughout this ritual, which for me (amateur that I am) has all the appeal of an obstacle course, it is clear that he, having chosen these constraints, is delighted by the possibility of triumph in the face of risk. Triumph is no more than an occasional defeat of failure. ‘The plate is good!’ he tells me. He is clearly surprised, perhaps even a little disappointed, to have succeeded on his very first try, as often he will spend a whole day attempting fruitlessly to capture the same image, again and again. Observing this, I understand that, in this practice, the process is just as important as the result. Making a wet collodion photograph; what more rational reply could this man give to the only question that counts: what to do with time? What is this thing, a ‘good plate’, if not the formal perfection of a practice under constant threat of accident? Looking at the finished plate, I see the answer lies not in its fidelity to the little monument set up on the studio table, but in the breach: a rupture which speaks to the power, and the rightness, of the chosen medium. I am beholding a photograph, but I have the feeling of being before an engraving made by a fifteenth-century Rhine master. I who, whilst looking at the table, saw a shape, a little reliquary in which a man had stowed his memories, suddenly find myself rifling, burrowing, sinking deep into the incredible flaky textures of a world of grey and bristling pages. I have no need for words, it does not matter if I know what meaning the artist has given to this or that shape, as now I feel this lushly textured world with my own senses, my own experiences, peeling back physical layers as if on a journey within. I become this hand, the one that appears in certain images as if to show us what we’re meant to feel. Looking at these stacks of books, I feel I could count every page without making any mistakes. My eye has become stratigraphic, moving from bottom to top, counting out the time and history within the pile. I am looking at a shape, standing before it, but I endlessly go into it and it goes into me. It is cutting and soft, terribly so, monumental and dense. The brain is the seat of memory. Its shape is the fruit of recollection and oblivion. Looking in, I remember myself, and am lost.