Tasio Bidegain

Tasio Bidegain (b. 1996, Menorca) is a young interdisciplinary visual artist, freshly graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. He was raised in Paris, where he autonomously developed several independent artistic practices: painting, drawing, video, and photography – as a quotidian way to react and reflect on the surroundings. Over the last years, his practices have been converging into the creation of large scale hand-carved photographs, leading him to establish his very own pictorial technique and visual language. His work is part of the ABN Amro collection, as well as private collectors.

His current work is focused on merging analogue and digital practices together into crafted images that can carry complex narratives. He aims at creating new visual ways of describing the intricate facets of reality, in an attempt to synthesize and fixate in time his personal experience of the chaotic world. Bidegain’s work process is both material and research-based and stands at a crossroads in-between figuration and abstraction, graphically communicating ideas while leaving space for subjective interpretations to arise.

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 the worldwide lockdown for the series Paris Syndrome.

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.

Bidegain 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.

Click here for the CV