Marc Bauer: The Collector

Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris, France

The collector is the one who gathers what is scattered, he thus creates his order in the universe that surrounds him and establishes his power in the control and the reunion of the objects that belong to him. Marc Bauer focuses with this project on a dark period of history, France under the occupation, and in particular on the spoliation of Jewish property by the Nazis. He reconstructs the atmosphere of bourgeois Parisian apartments that were left in a hurry, and puts them in perspective with other collections.

 

In a format as reminiscent of artists' notebooks as it is of the German vocabulary manual Wir Sprechen Deutsch from the 1970s, Marc Bauer's drawings exude a strange atmosphere to which the use of black pencil only adds a disturbing sensation. But the drawings, sometimes enhanced with color, remain beautifully intact and intertwine perfectly with the texts, which dot the pages.