Lucien Bitaux (English)

Archifossiles

2025

Polished and printed aluminum, Plexiglas, motors, cables

Credits: Production Chroniques with the support of the city of Aix-en-Provence

Geometric surfaces move and reconstruct a time that no eye has been able to see: the time before life existed. Meteorites imprinted on these surfaces provide visual clues to this ancestral time.

This field of exploration also resembles an archaeological dig. All the mirrored patterns come from stones that have fallen from the sky. These polished sections of meteorite, photographed at CEREGE (a geology laboratory in Aix-en-Provence) and enlarged hundreds of times, reveal a certain geometry: straight lines, spheres, perpendiculars and regular patterns give the impression of primitive mathematics. Astronomers use mirrors to capture ancient signals (light from the Sun takes around 8 minutes to reach us, while light from Andromeda takes 2.5 million years). To symbolize the particular vertigo of an ancestral perceived live, mirrors are the elementary materials of these modules. The reflective surfaces move slowly and follow a continuous cycle, reconstituting a large-scale clock.

The tectonic plates proposed by the Archifossiles are a kind of model of an invented cosmos - or of a past time in reconstruction - whose main elements are stones and light.

Partners : CEREGE — Centre de Recherche et d’Enseignement en Géosciences de l’Environnement à Aix-en-Provence : Alain Véron, Bertrand Devouard, Jérôme Gatacceca

Bibémus

2025

Polished and printed aluminum, motors

Produced by Chroniques with the support of the City of Aix-en-Provence

An archipelago of images composes a mineral landscape. Cut like silex, these geographical shapes are randomly superimposed, responding in chaos to Vasarely's geometric motifs.

The starting point for this installation is the meeting of two images: a photograph taken in Chile's Valle del Arcoiris (Rainbow Valley) and Paul Cezanne's 1895 painting La Carrière de Bibémus. Both depict mineral textures, cut by the topography of the site. Cezanne's painting was then translated into a map based on the surfaces outlined by the artist. This schematization then became a tool for segmenting the photograph taken in Chile. It's a dialogue between the Roman quarry where the abstraction was born - as if carved in stone by Cezanne - and the Atacama desert, where numerous mines perforate the landscape. The scattered fragments of the image replay the idea of a universe in formation. Up close, the figures are regular clouds of colored dots; from afar, rocky chaos appears. Entropy and geometry create a world.

Mont Venturi

2025

Printed Plexiglas, aluminum, cable motors

Production Chroniques with the support of the city of Aix-en-Provence

The geological map of Mont Venturi (the Provençal name for Mont Sainte-Victoire) is broken down into a series of suspended forms. The platitude of the initial scientific information is converted into sculpture.

Today, satellite views provide us with a certain omniscience of terrestrial topography. Cartography has allowed us to appropriate territories and dominate their scale, and Mont Venturi is subject to the same normative treatment. Before all these automatic vision devices, Cezanne had explored this summit in a sensitive way, with a series of almost 90 views of Mont Sainte-Victoire. With this series, the painter from Aix-en-Provence linked this site to the history of abstraction. The artistic and the scientific are intertwined in this territory. The Mont Venturi installation stands at the intersection of the different types of representation to which the massif has been subjected. A free, visual interpretation of the geological map of Mont Venturi transforms the diagram into a series of colored clouds. The shades that symbolized the different mineral periods become floating spots, strata of time, and escape from the scientific model from which they were derived.

Rudiments

2023

Astronomical diagrams are printed on pebbles, mineral textures cover aluminium blocks. Astrophysicists' software graphics contrast with the rough stone, the roughness of the stones with the flatness of the metal. The ensemble moves from natural to transformed matter, like an image refinery.

Extractions

2023

Five images compose a tracking shot from the sky to the ground in Chile, with holes in them, pierced by imperfect disks. It is the absence of silicon wafers that interrupts the image. These surfaces, known as wafers, punctuate the exhibition space. Beneath the large photographs, or alongside them, we find the detached disks that complete the image. It turns out that these particular objects are normally used to manufacture digital photographic sensors (CCD and CMOS); here, they become image carriers, losing their status as tools. A deconstruction, an extraction, is at work.

Stones, Mountains, Skies, Stars

2023

5 prints on paper, brass, copper, bronze and aluminium
Film, 11’14 minutes, quiet

Arranged by mineral scale, the video rushes shot in Chile are printed on different metals (one per scale) image by image, each measuring 1cm wide for 1,700 photographs per format. These plates are then scanned to reform the film, which is then analogically compressed by the grain of the print: the film merges with its material, tending towards abstraction.

Monocristaux

2023

Produced by ADAGP with the support of École Normale Supérieure

Wafers, the silicon disks used in the microelectronics industry, are treated here as print media. They are engraved using the same process as that used to manufacture photosensors: photolithography. In partnership with the Laboratoire de Physique de l'École normale supérieure (LPENS), topographies of the Atacama desert, Chilean stones and mineral textures have been inscribed in silicon. A silent video montage shows the various stages in the production of these pieces on a miniature screen.

Deposits

2023

Engraving on silver paper, multiple single prints

Stones, mines, observatories, all from Chile, burn to become images, the red glow looking like a stroke of the Sun, but it's only a stroke of light.

Astronomer's perception

2022

Installation – Production Chroniques — Biennale des imaginaire numériques

Partner :
Le Fresnoy studio national des arts contemporains

Astronomer's perception is an unstable space, a kind of mechanical and speculative brain. It is a question of visualizing the elements that build our perception of the cosmos by taking as a starting point the mental space and the imagination of astronomers. Thus, from an image generator based on the model of the eye, the installation proposes an interpretation of the neuronal reactions to the night skies.

Different floating entities symbolize the role of ideas and stimuli that animate the cortex: lenses, prisms, transparent forms. These optical objects represent our cognitive and interpretative biases: placed in front of a source of light, a star, they alter the vision to provoke another one. The walls and the passers-by receive the images resulting from these optical objects: they are retinas.

The visuals that emerge from this cerebro-cosmic generator materialize the mental stereotypes that haunt our interpretations; the original star is deformed, adapted, bent, to the cerebral interpretations - our view is inscribed between the infinitely large and the infinitely small, between the cosmic beyond and the mental inside.

It is by placing ourselves behind the eye of the observer, by magnifying and imagining the mental mechanics when we contemplate the stars, that we ask how a small point on the black surface of the night can generate such a vast imagination. The cosmos is invented then infinitely far from the eyes, but also in the depths of the ideas.

Nadir – Picture Elements Explorer

2022

Installation – Production Fresnoy, studio national des arts contemporains

Partnership :
• Eindhoven University of Technology, Dept. of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry SFD Lab. Stimuli-responsive Functional Materials & Devices Group, Michael Debije et Jeroen Sol
• École Centrale de Lille, Didier Burgnies

Credits :
Artistic supervision: Justine Émard and Melik Ohanian
Programming: Lukas Truniger and Claire Pollet
Construction support : Brice Nouguès
Technical support : Cyprien Quairiat and Julie Machin
Production: Barbara Merlier and Luc-Jérôme Bailleul
Pedagogical coordination: Éric Prigent

Thanks : François Bedhomme, François Bonenfant, Didier Burgnies, Pascal Buteaux, Sébastien Cabour, Michael Debije, Pauline Delaplace, Nathalie Delbard, Justine Émard, Olivier Gade, Julie Machin, Julien Maire, Lucie Ménard, Barbara Merlier, Brice Nouguès, Melik Ohanian, Olivier Perriquet, Claire Pollet, Éric Prigent, Pascale Pronnier, Cyprien Quairiat, Solène Secq, Jeroen Sol, Hadrien Tequi, Lukas Truniger, Jean-Philippe Uzan et toutes les personnes ayant suivi l’élaboration du projet.

Find the activity of the Nadir on this dedicated web page:
http://nadir.lucienbitaux.fr/

In L'Écriture des pierres, Roger Caillois suggests that to split a stone and reveal its heart is to access the primitive image of the cosmos and reveal a parallel universe*.

In order to perceive cosmic dimensions inaccessible to the eye, we dig the earth to extract a dust essential to digital photography: silicon. This semiconductor, massively used to manufacture the instruments of observatories and space telescopes, would come directly from stellar explosions, the supernovae**. A cycle is therefore formed between the particles we collect on Earth and the stars we want to see: we have to search the ground to find grains of stars that allow us to image suns.

The transformation of the universe itself into a place of mining resources engages a change of state of the cosmic stones. They gradually lose their status of quasi-imaginary objects to become industrial assets in the same way as earthly stones.

Nadir, Picture Elements Explorer, is an instrument, a quasi-camera, a kind of space probe. A composite rock is exploited to form images. The machine then tries to reveal the paradoxes that structure astronomical imagery; between celestial surrealities and the mineral materialities of space representations; between inevitable disproportionate extractions and a poetry of the elements that traces a path linking the earth's core and the cosmic diffuse background.

* Roger Caillois, L’Écriture des pierres, in La Lecture des pierres, Éditions Xavier Barral, p.315, édité en 2014, écrit en 1970.

**— NASA, Exploding Stars Make Key Ingredient in Sand, Glass, 16 novembre 2018 — https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/exploding-stars-make-key-ingredient-in-sand-glass

Atlas of artistic fields (premices)

2021

Graphic compositions: collages, photographs Selection from a series of 15 "cartographies" made for the magazine Facette 7 "What freedom for the artist?", published by 50°Nord in April 2021.

Available for free at this link : https://issuu.com/50degresnord/docs/facettes_7

The first double page presents first of all a sort of glossary for the elements that will compose the maps, it is a small inventory of the objects used in my practice. And then, these elements are arranged, merged, superimposed, to form territories. They are organized in thoughts, in structured reflection, they draw geographies.

To think is to try, to operate, to transform, subject only to an experimental control in which only highly "worked" phenomena are involved, and which our apparatuses produce rather than record. […] When a model has succeeded in an order of problems, it tries it everywhere. The gradient is a net that one throws into the sea without knowing what it will bring back. Maurice Merleau Ponty, l’Œil et l’Esprit, 1960.

This carte blanche is a visual response to the questions raised by the theme of this year's Facette magazine. From the notions of artistic fields, zones of exploration, constraining structures, forms try to occupy playgrounds. These zones delimited by abstract borders only ask to be exceeded. But the presence of these lines makes the framework of these compositions transparent, these grids also become scaffoldings to which the forms hang. They are moreover nets which carry plastic objects. In an approach of schematization of the problems raised by the subject of the artistic freedom, these cards incarnate a taking back on the logic of my plastic production. It is the interaction between forms and their context of appearance which is represented here, it is the question of the conscious or unconscious constraints which frame the artistic fields. The bricolage, described by Levi-Strauss in La Pensée sauvage, allows a naive answer of these stakes of the artistic creation.

Wild images

2021

Prints on textile, sculptures in glass, aluminum, optics and natural objects

Prints : 120×200 cm
Sculptures : various formats

Within the context of the artistic residency of transmission Transat, proposed by the Ateliers Medicis at the C.A.L.M.E in Briançon, Lucien Bitaux proposed to the children to experiment around the shadows, the reflections, the projections, the diffractions, the spectra and all the other optical principles which allow the emergence of surprising forms, of curious perception, called here the Wild Images.
Between arts and sciences, the project aims to initiate the 9 - 11 year olds to the principles of photography but especially to make them aware of the plastic and artistic qualities of their production. The non-control of the result surprises, challenges and makes them want to make discoveries within the photographs they produce.

At the same time, Lucien Bitaux has produced an installation for the library. This one proposes glass frames composed of ingredients to see: optics associated with minerals and plants. These sorts of still lifes respond to the suspended photographs made with these same tools. Without retouching or trickery, these Wild Images play with our human perception, which we sometimes believe to be absolute and irreplaceable.

Phenomenological images

2021

Backlit tiles, engraved plastic plates engraved plastic plates, filters

33×22,5 cm

Phenomenological images are photographs engraved on plastic surfaces set in resonance. With these new images whose colors move according to the movement of the observer, the forms are born of the iridescence of the material.

The phenomenological images are declined in series, to form a set of matter-lights resulting from various mineral elements. The different visions that appear from this physical process raise the question of the minerality of the images.

The liminals, the metamorphosis
of the being in its vision

2020

Production Le Fresnoy, studio national des arts contemporains

• Approximately 40 optical devices made of plastic, glass, steel
• Multiple prints of photographs made through these devices
• Systems of monstration of these photographs

The aim of this project is to represent what sees: the seer. A system of optics that show themselves in the images was therefore made. The photographs produced then testify to the shape of the transparent object that allowed them to be captured. Between a precarious reality and an imperious reality, these images insist on the relativity of the sight and the representations.

Entoptic optics

These optical instruments have been manufactured in order to appear in the images they capture. They have defects, aberrations, they are imperfect, because they do not disappear in the photographic result. They assert themselves as pieces of reality, just like the environment they allow to capture. Sometimes composed of pre-existing objects or completely fabricated, the optical modules can be associated and arranged endlessly to propose ever new ways of seeing. When these tools are used, they are mounted in front of the camera without its industrial lens. In the exhibition, these optics become sculptures that face the pictures they have produced.

Photographic experiments

These multiple light boxes invite us to see the captures made through entoptic optics with a new perspective. Trapped in transparent layers, the silver prints are superimposed on digital images that appear on a screen, in front of or behind them. The visuals are constantly modified by these digital changes and infinitely question what we see or what we have seen. As a result, a viewer standing in the middle of this slowly changing landscape will never see the same thing twice. Each light box tries something with the images: some will superimpose them, others will associate them with the movements of a video, others will use optical phenomena that allow to see the image differently... One of the experiments also consists in the random conception of descriptive sentences of these mobile photographic landscapes. Words are randomly selected in a long list and write little stories that give keys to enter in this visual work.

The large films

These large floating formats allow us to enter completely into some of the captures. These visions, between figuration and abstraction, present a reality that we doubt, but which nevertheless gives us tangible clues of a material presence with clear forms that take shape in the middle of luminous apparitions, optical distortions, reflections…

The toolbox

2021

14 digital photographic prints
60×80 cm

Stones are scanned, on various colored backgrounds, to present them as tools. Indeed, I use them myself in most of my work. These portraits are a tribute to these minerals that appear in many projects.

Optical particles

2021

10 digital photographic prints 30×40 cm

The optical particles are digital photograms of optical instruments and slides. The photographic device is thus reversed: a light illuminates the sensor, the shadow of the optic is projected on it. The optic is no longer used to see, it is seen.

The smallest vertigo

2020

10 silver photographic prints, 3 prints on cotton

various formats

The smallest vertigo is a series of photographs of mountain landscapes without retouching. Through a prism, the eye of the camera goes crazy, the gaze is lost between skies and summits. A confusion is made between what is in front and what is behind, new horizons are drawn.

Anecdotal stars

2019

For the cultural magazine Espace(s) published by the CNES (National Space Center), the project Anecdotal stars suggests a confusion between images on screen and printed images. Moreover, the project was published in a small book of 26 pages including all the visual experiments.

Resonances

2018

Structure in aluminium profiles, diffusers, neon lights, filters, thermoformed plastic surfaces, organic objects

from 130×31×20 to 250×68×25 cm

These large boards are a kind of sky, openings to a new transparency. By playing with the interferences present in these large plastic prints of organic materials, a new decor is created.

The installation is appearing in levitation in a dark space, thus, we are immersed in the resonances which become floating visions. A resonance turns and shows the process of projection, they are completed by their photogram.

Laserographs

2018 — 2019

15 analog prints

These kind of aurora borealis in Bézier curves are photographic traces of diffracted light. The infra-world presented in movement becomes hypnotizing. The shadows of the forms resulting from the infinitely small are recorded. These silver prints made directly by laser become bridges between the technological and the analogical worlds. They are hematoma of light.

Émilie du Châtelet Scoposcope

2018

Machine in folded sheet metal without welding, motor, leds, lenses

100×100×30 cm

The Scoposcope Émilie du Châtelet allows a projection on three sides of plastic prints in rotation. The images of the transparent object come out of the machine.

René Descartes Scoposcope

2018

Machine in folded sheet metal without welding, motor, leds, handmade gyroscope, frosted plexiglass

80×80×80 cm

The René Descartes Scoposcope projects thermo-formed prints. It develops the principle of the scoposcopy on three dimensions, by proposing a giroscopic movement, the volume of the print is broken up on three faces.

Maurice Merleau Ponty Scoposcope

2018

Machine in folded sheet metal without welding, motors, leds, lasers, handmade gyroscope, frosted glass, lenses

120×60×100 cm

The Merleau-Ponty is a multi-functional scoposcope, offering a multitude of combinations to transmit the impressions captured. Always playing with movement and light, its modularity offers mobile visions of the world.

Interesting words

2018

book, 20 pieces

A tiny book bound in random order creates hazardous sentences with subjects and verbs. These microscopic words manufacture thought and give ideas.

Obscura Filippo Brunelleschi

2018

Aluminium profile machine, motor, lens, leds, mirror, turntable

60×30×35 cm

It is a machine to project objects live. The image is generated in the present, at the speed of light. The confusion between an object and its image no longer exists. The object has a relation to its image comparable to the one it would have to its shadow.

Lensoscope

2018

Laser beam on steel rods, lens on rods, engraved lenses on rods

variable dimensions

The lensoscope is an invented device composed of a laser, a blank lens and engraved lenses. Its objective is to record images on very small surfaces and to implant the image in the material. This laser/lens combination is then harmonized by the projection.

Black and white shadows

2018

Black and white analog prints

various dimensions

The black and white shadows are photograms from thermoformed prints. They are photographic records of the projections of the plastic prints, a trace of the volume. Starting from the transparent, we reach contrasted and readable images.

Color shadows

2019

Analog colored prints

various dimensions

The color shadows are color photograms of the thermoformed prints. They are recordings of the interferences present in the modeled plastic materials. From the transparency, interpretations of the objects are made.

Liminal Mission

2019

photographed inkjet prints, 4 prints

various formats

Miniscule images are printed, they represent parts of the world: stars, seas, plants, minerals, eyes... Rephotographed, these images open up another dimension: the dimension of the image itself.

Perfogrammes

2018

Sheets perforated with a laser cutter according to a customized dot pattern, diffusing PMMA sheets, leds

variable dimensions

Perforgamme is an invented image recording technique that includes the visual in the material, like a cut-out slide. By projection of these perforated images, a new materiality of what they represent appears, the light draws a spectrum.

Tactile charcoal

2017

Coal, wires, arduino, projector

With Camille Astié at the PaTI school in South Korea, we designed a graphic experiment made from charcoal. We made pieces of coal that react to touch and trigger sounds and images telling a climatic story. Earthquakes, storms, rains... All these elements are cumulative and create a new environment.

Korea in photographs

2017

series of digital photographs

Photographs taken in South Korea, from north to south, with the outside view of photographer Kim Hee Jung.

Illuigonie

2017

book, single edition

Illuigonie means "the imaginable but unverified origin of a thing", it is a made-up word. It is the title of this inventory, which includes a year of plastic research on 700 pages. This research feeds my productions and, sometimes, constitutes them.