A WRITE UP

During an interview on the life of Luis Khan, the architect I. M. Pei pointed out how, on architectural judgements, it is necessary to acknowledge the component of time: time is selection, time is repetition, time is endurance and limitation. Any architectural work needs to be analysed bearing in mind the shadow of time which rescales values and changes influences.

The work of Raymond Taudin Chabot seems, in this sense, to be extremely architectural: his preciously shot, deeply psychological and dramatically resolved videos and photographs are readable through the category of time as architectural value. It is not the architecture of the space though, that of forms and materials, shapes and proportions. It is the architecture of humankind, consisting of pauses and slow movements, gestures and subjective idiosyncrasies.

Raymond Taudin Chabot develops his work on the analysis of systems of power, unwrapping consequential concepts of psychological and physical dependence. He is interested in the definition and representation of the male gender, specifically throughout the aestheticism of the businessman's stereotypical masculinity. His research builds through a complex use of time as linearity and redundancy, using it not only as a cinematic language, but as a concrete phenomenal tool. Objectifying the spatial perception in such a way that the linear and cyclical do not only become a narrative but a physical perceivable element in the video.

In The Sitting (2003) he plays with a rotating installation linked with the circularity of the video itself. In Before Completion (2007) the cyclical and methodical zoom in and out of the camera becomes a corporeal and, at the same time, a conceptual adjunctive meaning to the voiceover. Any gesture is slowly and deeply scanned by tracking shots (Disposition, 2007) or by an intrusive fixed observation point (Calm, 2006), in such a way that the time of the action becomes the time of natural selection: the actors are exposed to a sort of human scrutiny by the eyes of the viewer that, guided by the artist' extreme control of timing, judge unmercifully.

Every character is subjected to a humanisation through dehumanisation: the artist applies a methodical deconstruction of the general and stereotypical figures of power, to reveal the weakness of the singular man, on an everlasting tension towards a degree zero of judgement. In this process time rescales values: with a slow change of focus or an imperceptible movement of light, any preconception can be subverted and any judgement rearranged.

In Archive Project (2007), Raymond's personal collection of images from international newspapers, time becomes once again selection and redistribution. Still starting from his interest on the cultural perception of power, Raymond seems to focus on a certain aspect of photojournalism. Never quoting the more or less evident socio-political intention of the photographer, he is testing the value of an image per se, as a stratified layer of different interactions. Taudin Chabot collects images with already three or four layers of interpretation: the actual scene represented in the shot, the photographers intention, the implementation by the editors of the paper and the cultural interpretation of the reader. The artist himself, as a reader, could be considered part of the latter, but he himself acts as a cultural producer who, cutting the image and making it part of his own archive, redistributes the values and creates another scenario. He doesn't simply give another meaning to the picture through substitution of values - what could be considered as mocking the first intention of the photojournalist - but shows the layers and the juxtapositions that stand under image, and through this action he creates a new meaning.

It is symtomatic that Raymond Taudin Chabot's work always starts with a schematic sketch of a set and a single action. All elements seem to be already there: the character, the shot and the movement. What needs to be added is the timing through which all these elements could be resolved in a coral action, and this is where the work really begins.

Francesco Pedraglio