MITAN

By Tamsin Smith

Dolby Chadwick Gallery is delighted to announce MITAN, an exhibition of recent work by French photographer Éric Antoine, on view from December 3, 2026–January 23, 2027.

MITAN is an Old French word meaning middle, center, or halfway. It is the name Éric Antoine has chosen for his fourth solo show at Dolby Chadwick Gallery, as well as the title of the third volume of a five-book series that he has conceived as an overarching encapsulation of his work. The unfolding of this opus is an epic undertaking that finds the fifty-year-old French artist at the midpoint of his life and career. Whether intentional or not, it’s impossible not to consider the artist’s vision in the context of classic story cycles chronicling a hero’s journey, in which the traveller leaves the familiar world, faces internal and external challenges, and returns home transformed.

Éric Antoine spent fifteen years touring the world as a photojournalist for prominent magazines and as a preeminent visual chronicler of skateboard culture. In 2010, he hit the stop button on the fast pace of globe-trotting and digital magazine reporting to explore a more visceral, intentional way of creating art. His mission was to discover a means of art-making that would subvert the limitations of modern attention spans and reimagine the passage of time itself.

To achieve this, Antoine uses a 19th-century method that yields a singular underexposed negative on glass. When backed by a dark surface, a positive image seems to float from the depths. The resulting ambrotypes read like luminous lakes of light and shadow, reflecting qualities and dimensions that are impossible to capture on photographic paper or digital screens. The ghostly images cast upon thick glass plates are akin to painting or sculpture. They are meant to be considered slowly and in person. Physicality is an essential element in Antoine’s approach to craft. He handles the raw chemicals, makes his own frames, lugs the heavy cameras across field and stream, and concentrates intently in situ on the dreamlike tableaus that he conjures from his surroundings.

Antoine isn’t searching for lost time but situating his viewer at a still point in which past, present, and future coexist. It’s an invitation to enter a state of eternal openness and oneness. Antoine may have removed all direct human portraiture from his art, but the human question lingers like dust motes in the mind. This sensation is particularly vivid in the Useful Lies series. What are the white circles beyond a skilled trick of the lens? Is it the absence of a human face or a portal for the viewer to self-situate within the scene? Is the ghostly quality that pervades these sublime works of art an invitation to or a criticism of human interruption?

Meaning is as fluid. Perspective is layered. What one feels shifts and evolves depending on where one stands, both emotionally and literally, in the presence of Antoine’s depictions. The hand of the artist is evident whether the subject is the forest landscape that he returns to again and again or the still lifes he assembles from documents, relics, and symbolic shapes. The hand, yes. The eye, of course. But it is an intensity of mental focus that emanates from all these images. Antoine is an artist of absolute immersion, meticulous detail, and resolute intention.

Perhaps the greatest gift he bestows upon the viewer is the desire to match his powers of concentration and punch through the surface world towards a deeper lived reality.

To capture the same tree or bend in a river is not to repeat a scene. It is to return to fundamental questions. What is beauty? What gives life meaning? How much is enough? Éric Antoine’s practice can be seen as a meditation on the transformative notion that all we need is already right around us.

Éric Antoine was born in 1974, in Audincourt, France. Before devoting himself to his art, Antoine worked as a reporter for several years. His photographs have been exhibited extensively in France and across Europe. This will be his fourth exhibition at the Dolby Chadwick Gallery.