An age of iron and concrete, 2010
It’s a gloomy world with a leaden horizon
Where through the night swim horror and blasphemy.
‘De profundis Clamavi’, Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)
Something happened when Rip Hopkins went to Musée de la Préhistoire, the most unknown, the less accessible, the most ‘ancient’ in France.
This order came from the dawn of time, forced him to make a series of primitives scenes in which he placed his sixty models. What kind of story is it? Or, what kind of prehistory? The artistic gesture’s one. It is the aim of each picture and that’s why they are all the same and all different.
Different because the archaeologist who works among the flints is not identical to the cleaning lady who washes the corridors. What makes them look alike is the photographic act which, like sexuality, is a phantasmagorical attempt to re-form the primeval unity.
Rip Hopkins asks to Christophe Donner to write beside his pictures in order to prolong this artistic gesture which occurred in Musée de la Préhistoire.
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