Hungarian artist Máté Dobokay turns chemical exhaustion into art at Bigaignon

PARIS.- Bigaignon presents, from October 8 to November 14, 2026, Studies in Depletion, the second solo exhibition at the gallery by Hungarian artist Máté Dobokay. Conceived as an extension of his major work Development till Exhaustion, the exhibition continues the artist’s investigation into the material limits of analog photography: the point at which the medium ceases to function, when chemical processes become exhausted, and when the photographic substrate breaks down before reassembling into a new form.

Since the origins of photography, time has been one of the medium’s fundamental dimensions. The photosensitive layer records and condenses duration. Máté Dobokay expands this principle of recording into a process in its own right: rather than producing a single image, he makes visible a succession of gradual, interdependent transformations. In this exhibition, exhaustion is therefore considered not merely as a technical phenomenon or as the progressive loss of a material’s capacity. It becomes an essential component of the medium’s very operation, of image formation, and of the artistic process itself. By methodically pushing photographic materials and processes to their limits, Máté Dobokay reveals both their mechanisms and their inherent fragility.

The exhibition is structured around three bodies of work exploring different forms of repetition, exhaustion, and material transformation.

With Development till Exhaustion, whose title echoes Dóra Maurer’s series Printing till Exhaustion of the Drypoint, Máté Dobokay uses repetition to examine the gradual weakening and transformation of matter. Sheets of photographic paper, exposed under identical conditions, are successively developed in the same chemical bath until the developer, progressively depleted, can no longer react with the photosensitive layer. The resulting prints form a gradient from black to white: a temporal imprint of the gradual exhaustion of the chemistry.

Fixation till Exhaustion acts as a counterpart to this work, making visible the other end of the photographic process. This time, it is not the developer but the fixer that is pushed to exhaustion, until the point at which the image can no longer be stabilized. The work thus materializes another boundary of the medium, revealing the progressive fatigue of the very agent whose purpose is to ensure the image’s permanence.

Finally, Parts of Matter shifts this investigation toward the materiality of photographic paper itself. Materials left over from previous experiments—test strips, failed enlargements, used photographic paper, and other discarded remnants—are pulped and then handcrafted into new sheets. During this process, the photosensitive layer and its support are entirely broken down before being reassembled into a new structure. As the operation is repeated, the sheets become thinner, develop holes, and eventually disintegrate. Ranging from granular grey to almost uniform white, they in turn form a gradient in which exhaustion becomes constitutive of the work itself.

Through these three bodies of work, Máté Dobokay examines the limits of the photographic medium, the exhaustion of chemical processes, the material structure of the image, and the paradox of repetition that can never produce exactly the same result twice. Photography is no longer considered merely as a means of producing or reproducing an image: it becomes a physical system whose transformations, residues, and thresholds of disappearance the artist lays bare.

In this quest to probe photography at the deepest level of its materiality, exhaustion is no longer understood as disappearance, but as a form in itself. The work thus becomes the very imprint of the processes that animate the medium and, inexorably, drive it toward its limits.