Jacques-André Boiffard: le sabotage de l'altérité

Following the split of the surrealist group - divided between the orthodox group led by André Breton and the subversive group, gathered around the charismatic figure of Georges Bataille - Jacques André Boiffard, photographer and former student of Man Ray, published in "Documents", the magazine designed and produced by Bataille, some of his most significant photographic images. As part of the great iconic project of "Documents", distorting the visual rhetoric of the surrealist portrait, Boiffard brings into dialogue some of the magazine's most significant theoretical contributions: images of masked faces, of headless bodies, of excessively enlarged body fragments, defining by sabotaged otherness, subverted what Bataille called the "dialectic of forms": a heretical dialectic, in which the place of the thesis is occupied by the notion of resemblance (identity), while the second pole - the antithesis - is inhabited by subversive, decomposing force which does not totally deny the form, but tears it up, deconstructs it, opens it, infects it with an impure otherness which makes reconciliation impossible at the level of synthesis.