Two years passed by between the day I first saw a bichromate gum print and the time I started to learn. During all this time I did not stop being obsessed by this process.
It is for me, the meeting of photography and painting, in the gesture as in the result. These images always leave a doubt their origin and allows infinite variations of the same image.
This process was invented in 1855 by Alphonse Poitevin, a French chemist, when he discovers that the potassium bichromate possesses the property to turn insoluble the arabic gum having been exposed to the light UV.
In practice it is a matter of spreading a viscous liquid on a paper, of exposing it to UV covered with a negative and of cleaning this material to reveal the image. It can seem simple but numerous parameters are almost uncontrollable: the temperature and the humidity of the workspace, the quality of the water or any tiny variations of the mixture of products. It is a long-term job because an edition without problem takes two to three weeks … But the result worth it, the patient brush reveals its magic.
