Rebekka Deubner: Strip

Excerpt from a text by Julie Héraut, Deputy Director of LE BAL

"An orange-red background, almost incandescent. An irregular yellow loop, attached by a small ring to what appears to be a fragment of fabric, its seams visible, with a few frayed threads hanging loose. The material has been worn; it has most certainly conformed to the shape of a body. Something seems to have been inscribed there, within the very tension of the material, on the glossy surface of the photographic paper.

The story of this photogram begins in 2018, the year in which the artist Rebekka Deubner suddenly loses her mother, Valérie. Surrounded by her family, she must carry out the very tangible tasks that fall to those who remain. Taking stock of Valérie's life is one of them: opening drawers wide, emptying wardrobes, deciding what will be kept and what must go. One day, above a pile of clothes, a flash of red catches her eye: it is one of her mother's pairs of knickers, which she immediately photographs, almost without thinking. Perhaps because this object embodies a more immediate form of intimacy than the others, or perhaps because its intense colour stands out so sharply from everything around it. (...)

The photogram then offers Rebekka Deubner a direct relationship with this material. In the darkroom, carefully selected pieces are placed directly onto photosensitive paper before being exposed to light. No camera comes between the artist and the object, allowing her to focus on the transparency or thickness of a textile. Familiar shapes sometimes become difficult to recognise. A piece of lingerie is reduced to a line or a mass, while light redistributes its volumes according to a logic no longer governed by everyday use.

Colour also takes on its full significance: reds, blues and greens give the photograms an almost joyful intensity, contrasting with the circumstances in which they were created. Yet this apparent abstraction never entirely erases the material history of what has been placed onto the paper. The fabrics that produce these photograms have been shaped by the ways in which they were used before, in turn, leaving their mark on the light-sensitive surface. An imprint of the imprint left by Valérie."