Alix Cleo Roubaud: A Portrait in Fragments

When Alix Cleo Roubaud died at the age of 31, she left behind a profound and deeply personal body of work exploring self-portraiture, life, illness, the body and death. Helene Giannecchini was the curator tasked with sorting through some six hundred photographs, letters, and other written documents belonging to the artist ahead of a posthumous retrospective held at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in 2014. But she had never met Alix Cleo Roubaud and this absence is felt keenly through her writing as she treads the boundaries between biography and fiction, life and art. Helene Giannecchini pieces together the fragments that remain of this fleeting but dazzling life, spotlighting the theoretical underpinnings of the photographer's ideas on the double, repetition and drawing out the influences of Wittgenstein and Gertrude Stein on her practice. Just as Alix Cleo Roubaud's art is approached through the notes jotted in her journal, and the material evidence of trial prints and chemical experiments from the darkroom, so too Helene Giannecchini respects the interstices in her account, allowing the blind spots of memory to be. This translation has been occasioned by a new showing of Alix Cleo Roubaud's work alongside that of Francesca Woodman, Shala Miller, Carla Williams and Justine Kurland in a group exhibition curated by Moyra Davey for Galerie Buchholz, New York.