Fredrikson / Estate
Lars Fredrikson / Estate
Fax, 1980
Unique artwork
Galerie in situ - Fabienne Leclerc, Paris et Gael Fredrikson
"FAXES"
In the 1960s Lars Fredrikson unearthed a military fax system at an antique store. In 1974 he started making his own faxes.
The prints were often taken from newspapers and magazines or meteorology, which he managed to record thanks to radio connection processes. The information received was directly transferred onto a recording paper: an electrode subjected its electrosensitive surface to an electrical pulse, making it change color depending on the intensity of the signal.
These electrographic prints generated networks of lines. They could form mappings or photographic images recalling the violent subjects that the artist tackled in his collages in the 1960s. Fredrikson sometimes blurred the prints by injecting sound frequencies or via reception of cosmic electromagnetic events, such as the visual incarnation of wave flows that passed through the means of communication.
Lars Fredrikson had an intense output of faxes at the turn of the 1970s, long before faxes became widely used in France and in the visual and data-communications arts by the late 1980s.
Extract from the text "FAX", Catalogue of the retrospective exhibition Lars Fredrikson at the MAMAC in Nice, November 2019 (ed. MOUSSE PUBLISHING 2019, page 241)