THE UNIVERSAL LAWS OF EXCHANGE

This text was first published as a press release for the solo exhibition Cru Bourgeois, Muro Gallery, Geneva, Switserland.

In our current economic situation, which is controlled by the expansion of finance capital rather than by production, progressing abstraction penetrates all social and economic realms. In contrast to the immateriality and abstraction of the current financial operations, there are nevertheless the vast physical networks and infrastructure that demand certain processes of production and distribution. Within these global logistics, commodities, information and migrant work underlie different laws of circulation.

On an aesthetic level, abstraction as investigated by Modernism has largely been translated into the ever-present world of design, manifested in products, graphics, logos and brands, creating a visually frictionless world of flatness and interchangeability.

The work of Raymond Taudin Chabot operates within the framework of these complex contradictions of exchange.

His series of large photographic prints titled Country Road Casual (2010) depicts various logos of transport companies. These logos are vectoral symbols of speed, transnational logistics and the limitless circulation of goods.  Photographed on the very trucks at night, the physical traces revealed on the canvases lift the logos from their one dimensionality.

City maps, maps of Europe or maps of the world are present in many of the spaces depicted in the slide show entitled Silent Queue (2008). The origin or the function of these spaces remains opaque but they indicate the existence of the precarious reality of a parallel economy.

In Henkersmahlzeit (2010), a series of photographic portraits of men in suits are censored by the pixilation of the heads. The color fields of the pixels are meticulously silkscreened onto the photograph, a process that playfully mimics both Modernist aesthetic abstraction and design.

The video Archive I (2009) consists of a wide collection of newspaper images showing riots, demonstrations and revolts. The individual images are loosely categorized into sequences, not by chronological or geographical criteria, but purely by visual codes and signs.

The timely reproduction of news images was impossible until in 1924 when M. Edouart Belin invented a device called Telestereograph, which allowed the electronic transmission of images over the telephone line. Images were spread almost directly around the globe and were printed in the next edition of the local newspaper.

Alexandra Navratil