Aggravure

Started off in 2004, the technique and concept of «aggravure», or «stapplegraving» with wall staples are linked to image in architecture, an implicit reference to fresco. Here the main material, is a media playing with contemporary aggression and everyday life's profane utility.

This work explores and associates ancient and contemporary themes around the notion of human representation.

«What interests me in ancient engraving, is the notion of representation around themes developed in the mythology, in religion and their possible echoes with our ideals of today.»

Engraving was, for a long time the one and only technique enabling image to be multiplied. Its history is made of a succession of technical developments strongly characterized by the evolution of image's use and therefore of their function in 20th century art (lithography, serigraphy, photography...).

The technique, which is used, operates as an emblematic link between historical engraving and modern forms of violence, as seen daily in the media. Baptiste Debombourg turns this violence into a powerful force. He creates a work, in which this power is neither denied or put to sleep. It is rather dominated by the integrated technique and the form it shapes up in. Five hundred thousand stapples, just as missiles, pierce through the wood bearing. A precious metallic form appears, giving the illusion of a big embroidered tapestry. The aesthetisation of the unaccountable arises through a theatricalization of reality. His sophisticated compositions, staging intertwined bodies in an ever-actual violent action, denounces the world's, and people's instability, showing at once the most desperate act of love and the coldest murderer's gesture.

(Aggravure III, a composition inspired from Hendrick Goltzius, Jan Harmensz, Cherubino Alberti... who themselves reproduced the work of Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem, Adrien de Vries...). Following images are from a series on Dürer, and « Aggravures » from the « Agony in the garden » exposition crafted on painted wooden panels. Aggravures XXV, showed for Meurice 2012 awards is a reflexion on the theme of erotism through a contemporary interpretation of the meeting of two major works in Art History : The Luncheon on the grass by d'Edouard Manet (1863) and The Abductions of the Sabines from Jan Harmensz Muller (1593). Aggravure XXV is a reinterpretation on « Innocent massacre » by Marcantonio Raimondi (1514) from Rafaël (1483).