Percevoir — Thomas Sauvin & François Durif (2022)

Sauvin, long immersed in vernacular Chinese photography via his Beijing Silvermine archive, here selects and manipulates images with a forensic eye and a forensic burn. Photographs are not just shown but wounded, chemically treated, their surfaces blistered, oxidized, obliterated.

This volume presents Sauvin’s interventions as a meditation on memory and disappearance in the Chinese urban imaginary. The cover alone tells you everything: a soldier or a guard in grey-blue uniform stands before a crimson gate in what could be a tourist snap from the early 1990s, only his face and torso have been seared into an acid rainbow void. The year “93” lingers at the edge of the frame. François Durif’s accompanying text moves in and around these visual ghosts, drawing a parallel poetic thread that doesn’t attempt to explain the images but rather echoes their dissonance.

Printed in 2022 with a separate booklet insert, Percevoir is an object of sharp editorial intent and material presence — rough-edged, neatly brutal, situated between archive, accident, and authorship. It resonates in the Darwin collection alongside other practitioners of vernacular subversion and surface damage — think Araki’s scratched polaroids, or Erik Kessels’ In Almost Every Picture. But Sauvin is less ironic, more elegiac. The images don’t look found. They look lost.

Technical Sheet
Title: Percevoir
Artist / Author: Thomas Sauvin, François Durif
Date: 2022
Technique / Printing Method: Offset
Medium / Materials: Softcover with wraparound insert
Language: French
Pages: Unstated
Publisher / Editor: Éditions de La Martinière
ISBN: 979-10-401-1114-6
Condition: NEW