Portrait Clinique #11 (Clinical Portrait #11)

French artist Eric Manigaud investigates the act of looking. His large-scale hyper-realist drawings reproduce archival photographs in immaculate detail, relishing the collision of different layers of observation: the gaze of the original subject, the photographer’s viewpoint through the camera lens, his own painstaking scrutiny and the viewer’s engagement with the image. His sources stem from a variety of dark historical moments, capturing nineteenth-century asylum inmates, colonial frontiers, bombed cities and war victims. Included in the 2013 exhibition Paper at the Saatchi Gallery, Portrait Clinique #11 (2010) belongs to a series of works based on images from the State Care and Medical Facility in Weilmünster, where Jewish patients were mistreated during the Second World War. Inspired by Georges Bataille’s writings on the representation of evil, Manigaud extends the legacy of Gerhard Richter, who was similarly fascinated by the role of photography in a traumatised post-War world. The myriad tonal registers of pencil allow him to capture the unique materiality of his sources, which he projects onto a life-size, cinematic scale before transcribing onto paper. For Manigaud, the result strips away the distancing, neutralising effects of photography, ‘re-memorialising’ the horrors documented by the original image.