Too often we perceive photography based on Barthes' famous “it was”. In other words, like a suspension of time, a simple stop on a past, past, frozen moment. However, if there is an artist who refutes this deadly curse, it is Jean-François Rauzier. His images, or more exactly his photomontages, defy time, even invert it. They draw their origins from reality, our reality. This photographer never ceases to survey our planet, gleaning thousands of views that he archives and then assembles into abundant, almost baroque works. The eye recognizes patterns, architectures, reassuring fragments of things seen and memorized. All these series - notably La Balade de Paris - bear witness to this.

At the same time, what is there in front of us, what is presented in the imposing form of a photographic painting, is quite another thing. You have to lose yourself in these images, drown in the avalanche of details, navigate the explicit references ranging from the great history of art to that, more contemporary, of the media. Take the Babels series. Babel offers the example of a Western myth which, over time, has become universal. Doesn't it showcase the famous Greek Hybris, this propensity for excess and pride in the face of the divine? God had decided: henceforth a thousand languages and borders will separate humans. For Jean-François Rauzier, Babel is lived in the present. It is this absence of humility, this need to challenge the impossible. Bend and constrain the nature of our world in a way. This is what he is staging. But, as often with him, this proliferation takes the classic form of old works.

Here, Van Valkenborch, Brueghel the Younger and the Elder, Van Cleve, so many painters whose composition and tones he updates. Here then is an art which advances masked. Beyond a game that is falsely nostalgic for the works of the past, Jean-François Rauzier recomposes our present to better summon our future. The maze of references, the disjunction between an overall composition and the infinite scrambling of details have only one goal: to bring our imagination to boil. There is chaos at home. But a chaos that joins the cosmos. Yes, this is an art that must be rebuilt mentally to better force it to blend in with our eternal thirst for dreams. Therein lies its power and its relevance. Therein lies just as much its singular position and, let's face it, unique.

Damien Sausset