Anita Gauran visits museums and archaeological sites with a film camera. Back into the studio, no photoshopage or digital printing, therefore, but a patient work in the darkroom. Even if her universe is made of ancient and medieval figures, Anita Gauran’s work is not anachronistic but rather militant. Indeed, her attitude is unique within a generation that intensely pursues a practice of image appropriation now all available on the web : this infinite catalog of Greek columns that nourrishes the strangely called post Internet aesthetic.

Her approach has nothing to deal with nostalgia or romantism. Rayograms, impressions or transfers do work symbolically as auscultation technics in what could be called a process of materialistic revelation. Moreover, it seems that the artist uses all the tools and chemical formulas of analogue photography within a dialectic of duplication or even a white magic. As such it is not trivial to extend Man Ray’s radiation experiments in which Breton saw the figure of the artist mediumship. In Anita Gauran’s rayograms, the ghost of the object in direct contact with the image establishes in the rest of the work a mechanic working on presence-absence, disappearance-appearance or discovered-hidden.