From the series Paris Syndrome
Screenshots of riots, adds for face-masks, media footage covering the pandemic, classical paintings, and landscapes of cities in ruins are amongst the images that Tasio Bidegain encountered and drew during this worldwide lockdown.
The surgical sharpness of Bidegain's drawings, mimicking the cold, systematic, and unsparing tone of the information cycle, contrasts with the enchanted reality of the pictures, weaving a constellation of modern narratives. In those “confined” photographs, taken in the empty streets or inside the monotony of an apartment, the banality of our routine, trash, flowers, or buildings suddenly reveals an appealing and chimerical glow. Through this editorial project, Tasio Bidegain intended to create a time-document that could encapsulate his artistic manifestations of the current global crisis.
The title Paris Syndrome refers to a condition experienced by some individuals when visiting Paris - a result of the extreme shock by discovering that Paris is not as beautiful as they have assumed. Such disorder is caused by the exclusively positive representations of the city in popular culture, which leads to an immense disappointment as the reality of experiencing the city is very different from the expectations: visitors are confronted with an overcrowded and littered city.
Tasio Bidegain (1996) graduated this year at the Photography department of the Rietveld Academy. He describes his working method as 'etching on photography'. He scratches the photographs, causing the image to partially disappear and the white of the photo paper to become visible.