As distilled in the 1949 drawing by Toyen from which the title of the current exhibition at Air de Paris is taken [1], Véronique Bourgoin, Juli Susin (and, in a wider framework, their friends and colleagues in the Royal Book Lodge) have worked on the liminal fringes of an epistemological and aesthetic paradox exemplified by their inheritance of and salient dispute with the radical dissipation of alchemical metaphoricity. Consider Raoul Vaneigem’s tart critique of Surrealism set out in Histoire désinvolte du surrealisme (1977) [2]. His revisionist thinking about the movement turns on what he (and others) identified as a bifurcation in the early 1930s between its political realignment (he calls it a “militant ... dalliance”) with the Communist Party, on the one hand, and the emergence of “‘magical’ works . . spurred on,” he contends, “by the revelation of Alberto Giacometti’s ‘objects with symbolic functions,’” on the other. The resonantly poetic counter-signification of Surrealist objects of various constitutions and names, served, in this reading, as a conduit for the accentuation of speculative, metaphysical, and mythological orientations about which Vaneigem was—in 1977, at least—almost entirely suspicious. Further, magical thinking of this kind only accelerated, he argued, during the attenuation of the Surrealist movement in the 1950s and 60s (and after). As Vaneigem observed, André Breton, as if on cue, asserted in “On Surrealism in Its Living Works” (1953)— with bellows tracking from hand to mouth— that “the whole point, for Surrealism, was to convince ourselves that we had got our hands on the ‘prime matter’ (in the alchemical sense) of language.”[3] Breton’s argument, of course, was not new, returning as it did to several earlier formulations including, perhaps most famously, Max Ernst’s association of collage with alchemy in his 1937 essay “Au-delà de la peinture.”[4]
A decade and a half earlier, however, Vaneigem had offered a rather different orientation to the transformative capacity of alchemy. Working “in the perspective of the Nietzschean project,” he resolved in 1963 that “We will form a small, almost alchemical, experimental group within which the realization of the total man can be started.” [5] Bourgoin, Susin and their friends were animated by the vapor trail of this call, giving rise to a formation that is succinct, mobile, residual and metamorphic, blown by a whiff of post-humanist totality—enough to burnish a trail from Abkhazia and Albisola Superiore to Iceland and Paraguay. This comradely utopian evaporation was tinged—and singed—by a flicker of the ultimate condition of change conjured up by Debord in The Society of the Spectacle: “the end of specialization, hierarchy and separation, and the transformation of existing conditions into ‘conditions of unity.’”[6]
Some of what has been achieved under the auspices of this vivid transformatory drift is vested in activist modes of re-materialization—manifest in the “laboratory”- bound photography largely confined to darkroom experiments that Bourgoin (and Susin) commenced in the second half of the 1980s.[7] Present in several bodies of work and investigation over the years, these concerns were subtly refracted in Bourgoin’s photographic series, Clouds, developed in Montreuil beginning in January 2015. These images are the product of vigorous overexposure in the laboratory of a silver-sensitive support. The dialogue established by Clouds with various formats of the Suprematist “Black Square” gives rise to a corrosive evocation of new technological icons, brought into being by sudden flashes of light—vibrations that diffuse into a halo, like an abstract sound—which seem to petition on behalf of a world of images continually threatened with erasure by a landslide of codes.[8]
Bourgoin points to a precedent for these materially probing forays in the chemistry-aligned philosophy of Denis Diderot, who argued for the centrality within emerging modern science of chemical research dedicated to the investigation of natural and artificially induced transformations, the prevalence of tactile exploration, and the unique frisson of laboratory experiment—claiming a privileged position for chemistry within the development of epistemological and philosophic adjudications between pure and applied scientific knowledge. Her work takes up with a refrain of physical alterations threaded—using different stiches—through the productions and effects of luminescence in her rayograms, large-scale analogical prints and recent fluorescent collages, shown at Air de Paris.
Important too, is a significant group of photographs taken by Bourgoin between the last years of the 1980s and the end of the following decade, some published in Willie ou pas Willie (1997) and Mr Schurcken Stuck (2000), featuring friends with whom she has worked over the years, and a number of recurrent subjects—nails, magnets, letters, sponges, eggs, hands—all caught up in a wider project investigating image overlay and material modification.[9] Apparent here, is a grain of auteurship that has inflected the work of both Susin and Bourgoin—even as the latter’s work shifted, from the mid-1990s through the first decade of the 21st century, toward questions of corporeal subjectivity and what one commentator has described as “theatrical intimacy.”[10] On the other hand, the conscious withdrawal of Bourgoin and Susin from collaboration with prevailing cultural norms was defined, in large part, by their acceptance and refusal of certain media. Opting for unstable or poorly fixed photographic supports, elements of “industrial compost,” and invented and often unproven techniques, they opened-up a vast array of new mechanical and chemical transformations, pushing their images towards anonymity and dysfunction (Susin) in sometimes harrowing attempts to reinforce them as bulwarks against the toxic aspects of contemporary life.
We encounter another scene dedicated to transmutation in the important body of work done by firing in and around Albisola, especially powerful in Susin’s dialogue with Raku commenced in the ceramics studio of Guido Garbarino, “Due G Ceramiche,” in Sassello and featured in the current exhibition.[11] Raku is an earthenware technique pioneered in Kyoto, Japan in the sixteenth century, involving rapid heating and cooling, including a reduction method that reduces the supply of oxygen to the objects after firing by setting them in flammable material and thus accentuating chance effects and variegation in the surface finishing. For Susin the molten drama of Raku production collides with his interests in volcanism, corrosion, material degradation, and crypto-alchemical metallurgy—the latter signaled in the repurposed metallurgical trade journal Revue du Nickel, copies of which Susin and Bourgoin found piled up in the Montreuil house they bought in the late 1980s; in another publication, the faux deluxe Matière Première (2005), the found title of which refers to the “primary materials” that constitute the grounds for production based on amalgamation; even in the name of one of Susin and Bourgoin’s many production joint-ventures, Silverbridge. It surfaces again in Susin’s later collaboration with Guðný Guðmundsdóttir on PRCLN T VLCN (Porcelain and Volcano, 2015), inspired by the elemental constitution of the Icelandic landscape, volcanic metaphors of fire and ice, and a meditation on ecological and human fragility.
Susin opened up a wider aperture in the productive scene of the alchemical imaginary during a series of visits to Asunción, Paraguay. Here he encountered Ángel Yegros, an impressionably “Ballardian” figure who magnetized the uncanny sense of time he had experienced during his first approach to the city.[12] In Yegros’s garden studio, dubbed Tekoha, the jungle mixed with deposits of scrap metal and glass waste collected from vacant lots and debris-filled rivulets descending from La Chacarita, Bañado Sur, and other barrios in and above the flood plain of the Paraguay River. It was a kind of half metalized Crystal World presided over by Yegros and his welding device—a Soldador fixing those anomalous rents in time brought on by a crystallizing jungle, remediating some of the cataclysms of colonial occupation and industrial riot.
— John C. Welchman, Los Angeles, 2025
[1] The exhibition-makers are indebted to poet, philosopher and cultural theorist Annie Le Brun (1942–2024), who believed until the end in the transformatory potential of Surrealist practice—in the exhibitionist “war machine . . . that Surrealism conceived between 1924 and 1966 [the year Breton died] . . . against the state of the world.” Julius Gavroche, “Annie Le Brun on Surrealism” [posted October 5, 2024], Autonomies; at https://aut-onomies.org/2024/10/annie-le-brun-on-surrealism/
[2] Jules-François Dupuis [Raoul Vaneigem], Histoire désinvolte du surréalisme (Nonville: Paul Vermont, 1977); reprinted in 1988 (Paris: L’Instant); trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith as A Cavalier History of Surrealism (AK Press, 1999); available at https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/postsi/cavalier02.html. The first part of this brief essay draws on my Marcel Broodthaers: Pense-Bête (Ghent: SMAK, 2024-25); the second part is in dialogue with Royal Book Lodge (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2023)—the special edition of which is in the current exhibition.
[3]André Breton, quoted in section 5 “Converting to Mysticism” of Vaneigem, A Cavalier History of Surrealism.
[4]See, Max Ernst, “Au-delà de la peinture,” Cahiers d’Art vol. 11 (Paris, 1936), pp. 149–182; trans Dorothea Tanning in Max Ernst, Beyond Painting: and Other Writings (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1948). See also chapter 7, “Dada and Surrealism: Alchemies of the Word” of my Invisible Colors: A Visual History of Titles (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997).
[5]Raoul Vaneigem, “Basic Banalities (Part 2),” Internationale Situationiste #8 (1963), trans. in Situationist International Anthology: Revised and Expanded Edition, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006), p. 172.
[6]Guy Dedord, The Society of the Spectacle, section 116, trans. Ken Knabb (Canberra, Australia: Treason Press,
2002), p. 34.
[7]These early photographic experiments were exhibited for the first time in the 1988 exhibition, État de siège (State of Siege) in the chapel of the Petits-Augustins at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, a space that had been largely inactive for the previous two centuries.
[8]Clouds was first shown in the exhibition Labyrinth of Time, Fotohof Gallery, Salzburg, Austria (March 2015).
[9]In a review of Bourgoin’s first one-person exhibition at the Jean-Pierre Lambert gallery in Paris in 1994, Michel Guerrin noted that her photographs were “wrinkled, the material abused, the prints (...) soiled by slag giving the impression of agelessness.” Le Monde, March 10, 1994, p. XI.
[10]See, Adolfo Montejo Navas, “Fragments to your Magnet” [“Fragmentos a su imán”], trans. Nigel Greenwood, Lápiz: Revista internacional del arte, no. 281/282 (2013), pp. 39-51.
[11]Susin and other Royal Book Lodge affiliates have worked since 2003 in the studio established in Albisola Superiore on the Ligurian coast of Italy by ceramicist Ivos Pacetti (1901-70), a friend and contemporary of Lucio Fontana whose innovative terzo fuoco (third firing) technique was used by Fontana beginning in the 1940s to achieve lustrous metallic sheens.
[12]A descendant of Fulgencio Yegros y Franco de Torres (1780-1821), the soldier and landowner who became the first head of state of an independent Paraguay, Ángel Yegros (b. 1943)—part of the group Los Novísimos in the 1960s—has been described as “an alchemist of the weld” whose sculptural and other practices are deeply connected to his indigenous roots.

Sans titre, 1999. Silver print on black and white baryta paper, multi exposure. 110 x 75 cm.

Mutter hatte Hunger 1, 1996. Silver print on black and white baryta paper, solarisation, multi exposure. 127 x 98 cm. Unique.

Déraison, 1996. Silver print on black and white baryta paper, solarisation, multi exposure. 127 x 93 cm.

Abuse, 1996. Black and white silver print on baryta paper. 112 x 88 cm.

Pinochio, 1996. Silver print on black and white baryta paper, multi exposure. 108 x 81 cm.

Secret, 1998. Silver print on black and white baryta paper, multi exposure. 112 x 79 cm.

Dream catcher, 1993. Silver print on black and white baryta paper, solarisation, double exposure. 167 x 140 cm.

Capsule T, 1998. Silver print on black and white baryta paper. 154 x 105 cm.

Garde-Fou, 1996. Silver print on black and white baryta paper, solarisation, multi exposure. 108 x 86 cm.

Sans titre, 1995. Silver print on black and white baryta paper, multi exposure. 117 x 79 cm.

1200 Kv, 2025. Rayogram of a drawing from the series Periodic Table of Common Elements, black and white silver print on baryta paper, resin, crisal, glass, pigment. 55 x 45 cm.

C2H5, 2019-2021. Rayogram of a drawing from the series Periodic Table of Common Elements, black and white silver print on baryta paper, resin, crisal, glass, pigment. 60 x 70 cm.

Dream, 2019-2021. Rayogram of a drawing from the series Periodic Table of Common Elements, black and white silver print on baryta paper, resin, crisal, glass, pigment. 55 x 65 cm.

Cloud 0111, 2015. Black and white silver print on baryta paper. 70 x 50 cm.

Cloud 10100, 2015. Black and white silver print on baryta paper. 60 x 50 cm

Cloud 10, 2015. Black and white silver print on baryta paper. 60 x 50 cm

Cloud 1111, 2015. Black and white silver print on baryta paper. 60 x 50 cm

Cloud 1111010011, 2015. Black and white silver print on baryta paper. 60 x 50 cm

Apyka, 2017. Metal structure, plexiglass, ceramics, hologram and lighting system, beetle, glass. 83 x 32 x 44 cm.

Beautiful day, 2018. Raku ceramic. 57 x 30 x 14 cm.

Cat’s Cradle, 2018. Raku ceramic, painted wood. 2 parts: 36,5 x 30 x 15,5 cm; 18;5 x 9 x 8 cm.

Sentinelles (series), 2018. Raku ceramic. Between 29 x 4,5 x 2,5 cm & 38 x 8 x 3 cm

Le Générateur, 2019-2022. Raku ceramic. 46 x 50 x 42 cm

Sans titre, 2018. Raku ceramic. 19 x 9 x 11 cm

Désobéissance, 2020-2025. Ink on paper, artist carved wooden frame. 37 x 29 cm

La Cellule (in collaboration with Mirron Mitzkewitch), 2022. Black and white silver print on baryta paper. Printed by Laboratoire Diamontino. 90 x 70 cm

De l’autre côté, 2025. Raku ceramic, Perspex, aluminum box, drain plug, wax. 42 x 59,5 x 7 cm.

Week-End, 2017. Ceramic, plexiglass, aluminium case. 60 x 40 x 25 cm.

L’Enclave, 2022. Raku ceramic. 40 x 46 x 7 cm.

Sans titre, 2019. Silver-glazed ceramic. 54 x 46 x 6 cm.

Sans titre, 2022. Raku ceramic, hologram. 50 x 57 x 11 cm.

Sans titre, 2022. Raku ceramic, hologram. 50 x 57 x 11 cm.

Connexion à la Mesure, 2013. Video, television, wood, plexiglass. 80 x 80 x 13 cm.