Everyday Ekphrastic Excursions: Olivier Rolin and Jean-Christophe Bailly

Abstract

This article examines the role of ekphrasis in Olivier Rolin’s Un chasseur de lions (2008) and Jean-Christophe Bailly’s Le Dépaysement, voyages en France (2011). Each work mobilizes ekphrasis in the service of an investigative excursion into real everyday spaces. Olivier Rolin historically reconstructs the enigmatic lion hunter Eugène Pertuiset, depicted in a painting by Édouard Manet. At the same time, he explores the parts of modern-day Paris where the traces of Manet can be discovered. As ekphrastic depictions of Manet’s paintings begin to colour Rolin’s perception of modern-day Paris, Un chasseur opens a trace space that blurs lines between past and present, and between representation and reality. In Le Dépaysement, Jean-Christophe Bailly sets out to see to what extent he can — in an increasingly globalized world — perceive what is ‘French’ about France. When he scrutinizes the landscape from a moving train, capturing details on the fly, a kind of spontaneous ekphrasis emerges in his description: groups of people walking resemble an engraving, an isolated house in the country looks like an image from the evening news. In this landscape turned imagescape, Bailly retrieves pictorial loci of collective familiarity. Both Rolin and Bailly ultimately employ ekphrasis as a particularly fruitful way of accessing the everyday, as they mobilize two-dimensional pictures in order to reveal deeper, often overlooked or hidden dimensions of everyday life.