NOSTALGIE DE LA LUMIÈRE
An exhibition of Evgen Bavcar
The exhibition runs from February 18 to March 21, 1999

I see things that others cannot see. I see the world as it could be.
Evgen Bavcar

At the age of eleven, Evgen Bavcar began to gradually lose his sight. A few years later he took his first photographs, determined to maintain a link with the visible and to show that the world of images could also belong to him.

As fleeting as its presence was, given the overly intellectual character of my perception, the dream of the inaccessible thing finally led me to take my first photographs. I did this, of course, without any artistic pretensions, since their aesthetic component is only vaguely apparent to me. The smooth surface of the images I took with my camera is not directed at me; for I retain only a material trace of the landscapes and people I have seen or encountered. Moreover, my gaze exists only in and through the simulacrum of the photograph as viewed by others. I delight in such immense impracticality. I need the gaze of the other for the images to come alive within myself.

Evgen Bavcar, Le voyeur absolu, Seuil, Fiction & Cie Series edited by Denis Roche, p. 15.

For Evgen Bavcar, a photograph is first a concept, a mental image that later takes the form of a face, memory, street scene, object, landscape or dream set forth and captured by the camera, like an eye freed from its socket.

Born in Slovenia in 1946, Evgen Bavcar lives and works mainly in Paris, where, in 1976, he completed a doctorate in the philosophy of aesthetics. He is a writer and photographer. His publications include Le voyeur absolu (Seuil), À la rencontre de l’ange (Janus Press) and Inaccessible étoile (Benteli). He is regularly invited as a guest lecturer on the European circuit. Nostalgie de la lumière is the first exhibition of his works to be shown in Canada.