JEAN FRANÇOIS RAUZIER

A new perspective

Jean-François Rauzier is an adventurer of viewpoints. Via classic photography,

both commercial and artistic, painting and sculpture, the search continued.
The advent of digital photography turned out to be the key to his success in
finding a new vision.
The fascination that Jean-François Rauzier has always held for art history, the
Renaissance and medieval imagery in particular brings us a whole new way of
seeing. Continuously questioning the way reality is represented, he uses
today’s technology to give us a different view, a new way to think. Using Greek
knowledge and techniques based on Thales and Euclid, the Renaissance artists
arrived at a vision with man as the center of the universe. Since then, spatial
representation is no longer an idealized perception, linked to God, but a
humanist, rational point of view. The multiplication of viewpoints in the works
of Jean-François Rauzier forces the spectator into a different way of looking.
We become active viewers. At first the panoramic print appears to be a classic
representation. But the perspective has been “corrected” to accommodate the
western eye in finding its cultural bearings. We are looking at a building in
perspective. It’s when we approach that we slowly become troubled – every
window is from a different viewpoint. So many windows, so many viewpoints!
Each cliché is its own entire universe, and it’s the juxtaposition of all of them
that creates another, a provocative confusion. It’s a fractalization of seeing…
a visual metonym. Man is no longer the center point of the universe: he’s
part of the universe, in his space and in his time, for the dimension of time is
equally important here.
Instant photography exists no longer: we enter into the actual time of creation
where each element of the work possesses its own instant. However, for the
spectator, the juxtaposition of these instants is not simply the sum of these
instants. We penetrate into a time that is no longer linear. There’s no more
beginning or end. We enter, as the artist shows us in his works, into a universe
outside of human time, a universal time.
But where man is not absent. His representation is equally universal, or wishes
to be: a “neutral” character donning a hat, an overcoat (our vision of the
anonymous). And what’s more, he is “cloned”. He’s not an actor but a witness
apparently resigned to his environment. With him comes the imposition of a
statement: the end of the Euclidian perspective.
In any case, the end of a world where the standardized image occupies every
inch of our lives, where even our existence becomes an image of itself.. Is it
time, perhaps to escape the impasse where the virtual presides over the real,
to adopt a new viewpoint, less “global” but more universal.

Henri COUDOUX, Library of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris, France