Like any explorer, Baptiste Rabichon doesn’t know exactly what he’s looking for. He follows his intuitions, imagines unknown territories, postulates their outlines. He knows that the journey is just as important as the destination, and even more so when it leads to imaginary lands. In recent years, his explorations have ranged across photography in all its forms. One of his procedures, for example, consists in combining digital compositions with gelatin-silver manipulations, all together on the same photosensitive support. With the pre-existing photos that he takes himself, finds in his cupboard, in magazines or books or on the Internet, the artist combines the results of his quotidian encounters. For example, in his works we may see flowers picked the day before or found in his pocket. Little things he finds, a little bit by chance, and that he then rather eccentrically decides to fit into his composition. Like a sculptor, he shapes photographic “objects” that are full of textures, colours, collages and tributes. His artisanal gestures produce results close to science fiction. For, like any explorer, Baptiste Rabichon plays games with time. His works takes us through the history of art, between Impressionist gardens and Warhol’s Flowers, alluding to Cubist guitars and to Surrealist figures and enriching them with bursts of contemporary triviality in the form, say; of Tic-Tacs or chewing gum. They also take inspiration from pop music: We’re beautiful like diamonds in the sky, which spreads over nearly 30 metres, was made by projecting diamonds directly onto photographic paper. Shine Bright. Like any explorer, Baptiste Rabichon’s quest is not static. In his latest project, the inner traveller chooses to explore the wide-open spaces in his own artistic vehicle: a recuperated caravan transformed into a travelling pinhole camera. It’s easy to picture our adventurer out on the roads of France, impressing gigantic images of the places he travels through. His prints reveal a friction between negative and positive, between photography and painting. Through these exhibited landscapes, like any explorer, Baptiste Rabichon offers a taste of adventure. Manon KLEIN