BAUDUIN

Born in 1943 in Plougoumelen, died in 2022 in Brittany, France

A self-taught artist, Bauduin began as a painter in the early 1960s. Around 1967, he started developing constructed sculptures inspired by Malevich. A grant from the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences took him to New York, where he lived from 1970 to 1974, making films and playing music. From this period onward, he enjoyed site-specific interventions, initially in urban environments and later in nature, to "de-pose" places and forms through measurements, interventions, and markings. In 1992, recalling the megaliths of his native Brittany, he placed a granite rock in a Zen garden during a study and research trip to Japan, at the instigation of the Japan Foundation. These outdoor actions are complemented by "earth drawings," models of landscapes or scale models of buildings presented on squares of thirty or forty centimeters per side, which reproduce his actions. The change of scale transforms the artist's titanic sculptures into minimalist forms, revealing only the geometric rigor of the shapes and the purity of the material, molded by human hands and composed of sand, granite, earth, iron, and glass. Simultaneously, he also uses video, a medium he has employed since the 1980s, to preserve a record of his ephemeral interventions.

Philippe BOUCHET (2003)

Characterized by its singularity and formal restraint, Bauduin's work defies strict definition and lies at the crossroads of Minimal, Conceptual, and Land Art. His approach stems from a need to distance himself from geometric abstraction and move towards a new artistic practice, which he termed "Déposer" (Deposing) in 1975. This key concept, which underpins his entire oeuvre, is Bauduin's intention: "to create a void in order to eliminate all opposition, to erase all duality between appearance and essence on the surface of things.".

His "depositions," which can take place in nature, on a monument, or on a document, employ subtle and unexpected formal and intellectual juxtapositions, prompting the viewer to question. This is the case with the megaliths, apprehended through old postcards, which Bauduin has repurposed by "de-posing" a square of glass, here simply drawn in front of giant stone blocks and alongside figures from the period standing beside them to provide scale. The glass square, when physically "de-posed" in nature, is a reflective medium that establishes a dialectic of the visible and the invisible, as well as a very particular relationship to time, place, and history, without ever imposing a particular viewpoint. The series on "The Dwellings" also corresponds to a work on sites of memory. Here, the said dwelling is evoked in its simplest, even archaic expression, by a block of granite which ends in a two-sloped summit.

It engages in a dialogue with the wall, with the relief outline of its plan confronting the viewer with an abstract transposition of spatial reality. As for the "Earth Drawings," miniature models of actions that took place outdoors or embodiments of future projects, their refined and minimalist aspect evokes the microcosm of Zen gardens in which the artist has made numerous interventions in Japan. They also evoke the meaning that the word geometry holds for Bauduin, which in its primary sense refers to the notions of earth and measurement that are dear to him. Some of the artist's works engage the viewer more directly, such as the series of "Hollowed Frames" (2012-2013), which, stripped of their canvases, open onto the wall: covered with rambling words, they infuse Bauduin's work with a poetic sensibility and a dose of the absurd, in the manner of Duchamp. One of the hollowed-out frames, crossed by a folding ruler in place of the canvas, sets the tone for this art which, with finely adjusted modesty, oscillates between measure and excess.

Domitille d'Orgeval (2018)