Francis Baudevin

Polydor, 2022

Acrylic painting on canvas

Work presented as part of the exhibition Echos d'une collection - Works by Frac Franche-Comté

‍

Untitled 2013

Produced for Francis Baudevin / Four walls (2013-2014), exhibition at the Frac de Franche-Comté.

Laser prints mounted on aluminum: 1/3+1AP

Photographer: Gérard Friedli. Lamination: Ted Support. Framing: Michel Currat

The seven elements :

n° 1 : Robert Ashley / Private Parts / With Settings For Piano / And Orchestra / By "Blue" Gene Tyranny
n°2 : Tony Conrad / Jutta Koether / John Miller / XXX Macarena
n°3 : The / Golden / Palominos / - A Dead / Horse
n°4 : Nana Vasconcelos / Ecm
n°5 : David / Van Vactor / Symphony / n°.1 / Werner / Josten / Symphony / In F / Cri / Composers / Recordings / Inc . Cri 225 Usd / Universal Stereo
n°6 : Branca / Symphony n°.3 / (Gloria) / Music For The 127 Intervals Of The Harmonic Series
n°7 : Burt / Bacharach / At / This / Time

Works presented as part of the exhibition Echos d'une collection - Works by Frac Franche-Comté

‍

Untitled, 2014 - Untitled, 2014

Laser print mounted on aluminum 

Photographer: Gérard Friedli. Lamination: Ted Support. Framing: Michel Currat

Works presented as part of the exhibition Echos d'une collection - Works by Frac Franche-Comté

‍

Francis Baudevin has gradually developed a whole part of his work from his passion for music and his extensive record collection. He is well versed in the history of the graphic arts and their relationship to the pictorial avant-gardes, of which album covers are a privileged means of expression.

The painting Polydor (2002) is based on the logo of a famous music label, evocative of a half-vinyl disc, which can also be likened to a sunrise. Fascinated by the vinyl medium and what it represents in the history of the democratic dissemination of art, Francis Baudevin sees this logo as a pictogram for recorded music, including that of today's downloads. So, when we look at Polydor, beyond the pictorial composition, we are aware of a sign that, thanks to its shape and the relationship between the colors black and red, is capable of recalling in our minds the listening practices of yesterday and today.

While these paintings remove all writing from the packaging and logos used as models, the photography, which he delegates, captures the real in its entirety and shows the sleeves with their graphic and typographic choices. At the crossroads of his collecting and artistic practices, Francis Baudevin likes to compose series. For the exhibition Francis Baudevin / Four Walls, at the Frac Franche-Comté (2013-2014), he presented a series of seven almost monochrome photographed records in shades of gray and ochre, for rather experimental music(Untitled, 2013).

Also in the collections of Frac Franche-Comté, two photographs from 2014 show covers chosen for the same graphic use of a guitar rosette crossed by the instrument's six strings. One circle features a woman (The Tony Touch, The Best of Tony Mottola), the other a parakeet (Charly Bird Hit Trip).

‍

‍

Francis Baudevin

Born 1964 in Bulle (CH)

Lives and works in Lausanne

‍

As early as 1987, as a student at the École supérieure d'art visuelle de Genève (now HEAD), in the studio of Cherif and Silvie Defraoui, Francis Baudevin was laying the foundations for his future work. Even though his first very concrete training as a graphic artist at the Beaux-arts was not necessarily well received, and even though painting seemed to have explored all the possibilities of abstraction, the student drew on both. He takes drug packaging, stripping it of all writing, and reproduces on canvas the flat areas of color chosen by the graphic artist, multiplying them by ten or a multiple of ten. In this way, he reveals the interpenetration of the two worlds, giving back to art what commercialism had borrowed from it. He usually titles his work with the name of the product (Alcacyl.BI, Rennie, Rivotril...), claiming his canvas as a sampling of reality, a "geometric figuration".

He soon drew his models from other fields (Carambar, Petit Robert 1 and 2...), mainly from music. An avid collector of a wide variety of records, with a predilection for contemporary, rock and experimental music, as well as a critic and dj in his spare time, he reproduces vinyl sleeves according to his usual pictorial principle, but also has them photographed, often forming series. Gradually, he detached himself from the meticulous reproduction of the colors of the objects he spotted, proposing new variations, daring to use fluorescent colors and experimenting with solarization.

Winner of numerous prizes and scholarships, Francis Baudevin has been teaching at the ECAL since 1996. In early 2023, the PasquArt art center in Biel dedicated a major exhibition to his work.