João Freitas's work is linked to the notion of trace, wear and tear, time, and he treats the structures that support him like skinned men: paper, cardboard, fabric, glass paper, wood, etc. The artist's intention is to gently violate the material to make it say something elusive, just as an anatomy sheet reveals the true structures and components of an organism.

With Freitas, there is a desire to reveal, to lift up matter, to give it a mystical meaning by revealing its mysteries and mutations, just as the work of the alchemist transmutes matter into ethers, vapours and other essences.

João Freitas is one of those artists who learn from his own work. Nothing seems decided at the outset of his dissections; he finds by searching, like an archaeologist unearthing a buried object. As an apprentice aesthete, sensitive and attentive, he looks for unlimited combinations of effects and games in these artefacts, generating an infinite poetry that does not exclude violence. And so, in this relationship with matter that is at once brutal and suave, he succeeds in making us resonate with these ineffable questions of time, tangibility and presence, becoming, in his crucible, a durable, touching and immanent material.

Whether through wear and tear, sanding or burning, folding, sewing or creasing, he reveals the material by giving it access to a transcendence, through a surgery that, without betraying it, rebirths the support in another dimension. This is the ineffable meaning of João's work. Like a photographic film, like a sgraffito or a 'scratch card', like a peel of skin, he reveals reality through a repetitive, almost meditative process of removing, butchering, tearing away and scratching, revealing the underlying reality in an approach akin to the new matierism, which grapples with questions of durability, gratuitousness, recuperation and re-enchantment. His demonstration is that of a thaumaturge, a sorcerer who reveals the true nature of the world, laying it bare to show its indevinable constitution.

Constantin Chariot, 2020

Born in Montpellier in 1987, Baptiste Rabichon lives and works in Paris. He graduated́ from the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2014, and was accepted at Le Fresnoy in 2015, from which he graduated with the congratulations of the jury in 2017. He is the winner of the 2017 BMW prize, of the 2018 Moly-Sabata/Salon de Montrouge prize and of the Picto/Lab 2021 prize. In 2019 and 2020, he is resident at the Cité Internationale des Arts.

In a relationship with images that is as much critical as it is loving, Baptiste Rabichon explores photography in all its forms, tackling both the ancestral methods of photography (photograms, pinhole cameras, cyanotypes) and the tools of modern imagery, which he tries, always with the same jubilation, to push to their limits. Today, the heart of his work consists of the creation of unique photographs, where, through a multitude of stages, digital and silver are intertwined within a single photosensitive medium.

Recently, Baptiste Rabichon has exhibited́ at the Rencontres d'Arles, at the Collection Lambert in Avignon, at the Lianzhou Museum of Photography, at the Pearl Museum in Shanghai, at the CACN in Nîmes, or at Untitled Miami and at OSTUDIO in New York. In 2020 he created a huge photographic installation for the Paris-Orly International Airport (visible until 2023). He is collected by the Carré d'Art in Nîmes, the Lam in Villeneuve d'Ascq, La Samaritaine in Paris, the BMW Group, the Balnibar Group in Japan and the Li Keran Foundation in Beijing.