Galerie Buchholz in New York is currently hosting the first solo exhibition outside France of Canadian photographer Alix Cléo Roubaud, who died tragically at the age of 31 in 1983. The exhibition, titled "Correction of perspective in my bedroom" and curated by Hélène Giannecchini, presents 39 small-scale gelatin silver prints that showcase the artist's experimental approach to photography. The show runs through October 25, 2025, at the gallery's location on East 82nd Street.
Born in Mexico City in 1952 to a diplomat father and painter mother, Roubaud lived a nomadic childhood across various international locations before settling in Paris at age 23. Her life was marked by severe asthma, which ultimately led to her death from a pulmonary embolism just eight years after arriving in France. This chronic illness profoundly influenced her artistic work, as evidenced in pieces like "Untitled (Fifteen minutes at night to the rhythm of breath)" from 1980, where she photographed cypress trees using an extremely long exposure while lying on her back with a camera on her chest. The resulting blur of the trees captures her labored breathing patterns.
At the time of her death, Roubaud's artistic work was virtually unknown to the broader art world. Her posthumous recognition came through the dedicated efforts of several key figures who championed her legacy. Her husband, renowned avant-garde poet Jacques Roubaud, wrote a book of verse in her memory and published selections from her personal journals. Her lover, filmmaker Jean Eustache, created "Les photos d'Alix," which won a César Award for best short fiction film in 1982. Art historian Hélène Giannecchini has devoted a significant portion of her career to preserving Roubaud's work, archiving her photographs and papers, writing the biography "Alix Cléo Roubaud: a portrait in fragments," and organizing exhibitions including this current New York show.
The exhibition features works displayed throughout the main gallery and a back room, which also includes related publications, contact sheets, and ephemera. For visitors who encountered Roubaud's work in last year's group exhibition "Forks & Spoons" at Buchholz, curated by artist Moyra Davey, or those familiar with the newly translated English version of Giannecchini's 2014 study, this comprehensive solo presentation offers a particularly significant opportunity to engage with her complete artistic vision.
Roubaud began her serious photographic practice in 1979, despite having taken photography courses during her undergraduate studies. Her approach was inherently experimental and labor-intensive, often spending up to ten hours perfecting a single print. She mastered various darkroom techniques that became central to her artistic vocabulary, including dodging methods to block unwanted portions of negatives and drawing directly on photosensitive surfaces. She would sometimes expose negatives with pen lights to create dramatic black streaks in final prints and frequently employed multiple exposures to achieve her desired effects.
One of her most psychologically charged works, "The mother's eyes" from 1981, demonstrates her sophisticated use of multiple exposure techniques. The photograph shows two sets of eyes emerging from a white expanse of unexposed paper, belonging to her mother with whom she had a deeply strained relationship. This tension originated when Roubaud was fifteen and began a passionate affair with a woman twice her age, which her mother discovered and forcibly ended. The doubled, vigilant gaze in the photograph seems to represent the intense scrutiny the young artist felt under her mother's watch.
In her untitled work from around 1980-82, Roubaud reaches back even further into her personal history, using a negative from a photograph taken during her childhood in Egypt. The image shows her as a young girl sitting among palm trees, but both elements are deliberately underexposed, creating a washed-out, pale appearance. The young Roubaud barely crosses the threshold of visibility, present but barely perceptible in this haunting image that combines photography's documentary capacity with experimental techniques to express the instability and fragility of memory. A companion piece layers the same palm trees repeatedly to create a dense forest with the Sphinx lurking in its depths.
The exhibition's title work, "Correction of perspective in my bedroom" from 1980, exemplifies Roubaud's innovative approach to self-portraiture. The series employs two nearly identical negatives showing the naked artist lying on a wooden floor, with slight differences—in one her face appears in profile, in the other she gazes directly at the viewer. By alternating and layering these images, she creates what can be described as a "stuttering self," revealing identity as inherently multiple and impossible to capture from any single perspective. This staging of identity reflects the performative aspects of her practice, drawing parallels to contemporary American photographers like Francesca Woodman and Duane Michals.
Like Michals, Roubaud often incorporated text into her visual work, disrupting the purity of the photographic image. In "The last room" from 1979, a typed letter from the artist lamenting the difficulties keeping her from an unspecified lover floats over a photograph of an empty bed. Other pieces weave fragments of emotional correspondence from her husband into images of her head and torso, or center around his poetry, as in "Untitled (Protohaïkus)" from around 1980-81. These text-image combinations function similarly to voice-overs in films by Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais, particularly "Hiroshima Mon Amour," where spoken narratives describe past events or imagined scenarios that relate to but never fully explain the visual content.
This uncertainty and elusiveness permeate Roubaud's experimental works, creating what exhibition reviewers describe as "an atmosphere of absence and loss." Her photographs tantalize viewers while simultaneously resisting complete access or understanding. As Roubaud herself wrote, the temporal nature of photography exists in "the future anterior"—a paradoxical, melancholic state indicating "that which, in the future, is already finished." She explained this concept by noting that "when you see this, it will no longer be," yet the camera captures a trace that becomes realized in the darkroom as an "absent presence" that pushes the medium beyond the merely visible into the realm of the conjured and imagined.
The current exhibition represents a crucial opportunity for American audiences to encounter the work of an artist whose brief but intensely creative career produced a unique body of experimental photography that continues to influence contemporary art practices decades after her death.
