Alix Cléo Roubaud

Galerie Buchholz is pleased to present Correction of perspective in my bedroom, an exhibition of the work of Alix Cléo Roubaud (1952-1983) curated by the art historian and writer Hélène Giannecchini. This is the first solo exhibition of Alix Cléo Roubaud’s work outside of France and follows her inclusion in “Forks & Spoons,” a group exhibition organized by Moyra Davey at Galerie Buchholz New York in 2024.

Born in Mexico City in 1952, Roubaud grew up between Egypt, Portugal, Greece, South Africa, and Canada before settling in France in 1972. She studied philosophy at Paris 8 in Vincennes-Saint-Denis, writing in depth on Wittgenstein. From the summer of 1979 on, Roubaud devoted herself to the pursuit of photography, concentrating her writing efforts into her journal and a number of short theoretical texts on photography. That year marked the beginning of her relationship with the writer and mathematician Jacques Roubaud, whom she married in 1980.

Working primarily in a bathroom darkroom in her apartment at 64 rue Vieille-du-Temple, Roubaud deployed experimental printing techniques, producing high-key prints built from multiple exposures (sometimes as many as 10 per print), abstract manipulations of light, extensive burning and dodging, the use of a light pencil, and, more rarely, colored pencil, staining, and tinting. She destroyed her negatives, writing in 1979 that “the negative should only be kept for as long as the result of processing it retains something of the living memory of the intended image.” Each print is unique.

This exhibition takes as a point of departure her work at the intersection of writing and photography. Throughout there is a fragmentary, oblique, expanded sense of self-portraiture at the heart of much of her work, in both her photographs and writing. She described her practice as akin to keeping a diary, with photography as a way of inscribing the days, and writing offering another form of capturing images. Roubaud’s photographs move between intimate representations of her romantic, emotional and psychological interests and a rigorous articulation of different conceptual strategies inherent in photography itself.