Jean-Pierre Sudre

There’s an enticing aura of mystery to the work of French photographer Jean-Pierre Su- dre (1921–97), the obscurity of his technique and the abstract cast of his imagery mirroring each other to produce a singular and highly evocative set of results.

In the realm of photographic abstraction, Sudre’s pictures stand out – his mix of processes and experimentation led to works that don’t look like anything else we’ve seen before (or since). Their extremes force us beyond simple admiration of their rhythms and complexities into a grasping search for analogies – their strangeness looks like something else, what exactly we can’t quite say. These are intense photographic expressions, ones whose densely packed mysteries and allusions keep us wondering.

This survey show of the work of Jean-Pierre Sudre does just that – it reintroduces superlative examples of Sudre’s mordançage process and then places them in the larger context of the aesthetic choices he made during his artistic career. It’s an exhibit that gives us both the “what” of the innovative and obscure process and then surrounds it with the “why” of the evolving artistic intent.

Sudre’s experimentation, which continued until the early nineteen-nineties (he died in 1997), remained marvellously various, ranging in tone from psychedelic to scientific.