Fragments 9, 2026

Baboute  

Baboute, born in 1969 in Saint-Etienne, has been developing a practice centered on the motif for over thirty years, considered as a system of production and transformation of the image.

Trained at the Beaux-Arts under Philippe Favier and Philippe Louisgrand, he situates his work within a reflection on repetition, variation, and the construction of the image. The influence of Claude Viallat also informs his research, particularly in the idea of the motif as an autonomous structure.

Her work develops in series, where forms, formats, and colors interact and extend one another. Each work constitutes a fragment of an expanding whole, where the motif circulates and transforms.

Presented together, the works unfold a logic that transcends the individual: the motif shifts from one format to another and inhabits the exhibition space, transforming each painting into a window onto a moving visual field. The hanging thus becomes an active element, revealing the correspondences and tensions between the pieces.

Within this dynamic, specific elements—lines, colored circles—interrupt and rhythmically structure the surface, introducing visual anchor points. These signs contribute to a tension in the reading experience and engage with the history of abstraction, particularly echoing the work of Sophie Taeuber-Arp.

The work thus unfolds as a continuous field, where repetition is never identical but always in motion, and where the image is constructed in the articulation between the surface, the series and the space that receives it.

Nora Khennouf, Religious, Political and Cultural History.