Patrick BURBAN

Patrick Burban was born in 1957, in Nantes. Between 1975 and 1981, he studied at the Ecole régionale des Beaux-Arts de Nantes. As soon as 1975, he started to use photography as a way to express himself.

In 1980, he produced series of work composed of several photographs. He thought about junction, physical and technical bridges between photographs. He was one of the first to try out of phase series inspired by Jan Dibbets – his “mentor” in a way. In 1990 he participated in the La Conversation exhibition held at the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Strasbourg. In 1992, he took part in the Portrait d'une Capitale at the Musée Carnavalet in Paris and incorporated in the baudoin lebon gallery for the 1993 Salon Découvertes. The said gallery represented him at the 1995 Paris FIAC with his La Condition Humaine series in which photographs move towards the expansive proof of the eternal turn-back rhetoric.

In his 1997 series Babelsberg, a piling and accumulation row, including nice paper bundle declining in its own way the necessary and the random, he continued his inquires in the search of high precision for mises-en-abîme. The following year, he started over and completed the series for his personal exhibition at the baudoin lebon gallery. This year, he also shot and directed the Atropos film, a sometimes mineral, sometimes aquatic meditation that stretches and unravels, punctuated by thin banner flapping in the wind. Condensed vital urges confronting different temporality and relayed by the three Fates confirm the existence of an affirmed personal cosmology.

Using the name Diagrammes, he continued experimented new paths. What he calls “anchor points” that we could as well call “stitches”, as they are visible on moving or stationary objects, disturb the landscape's logic. Unlikely landscapes, a time in between times fixed in the interference of every possibility.

Photography then gets close to the impassable, reflexion on space, towards the furthest point of space, the closest point to the outside still inside, where balance is always a question. At the 2007 Paris Photo, he exhibited Nature & Artifice, a Diagrammes variation, with the baudoin lebon gallery.

“It's a work on time and outside time. By digressing on a personal mythology, said to be ancient, I borrow, abduct, and make things overlap. I clarify, sort and then confuse the spectator. It's about memory. I erect those buildings against my fear of crumbling, rotting, and disappearing.”, Patrick Burban.