French artist Eric Manigaud investigates the act of looking. His large-scale hyper-realist drawings meticulously 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. The photographs he chooses stem from a variety of dark historic moments, capturing nineteenth-century asylum inmates, colonial frontiers and war victims, among others. Executed in 2011, Cologne 1, 1945 belongs to his series of works based on aerial photographs depicting the bombed German city 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. Consuming the artist for up to four months, this process ‘emphasises the evanescent or ghostly quality of a photographic image, through its projected enlargement’, he explains. ‘The matter is then to transcribe this particular texture (created by the lit slide) with the use of the graphite's powder, while trying to keep alive the surface of the paper.’ For Manigaud, the result strips away the distancing, neutralising effects of photography, ‘re-memorialising’ the horrors documented by the original image.
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