Agathe de Bailliencourt's artistic practice spans widely across painting, drawing, film, installation, and sculpture, with a central focus on the registration of time. Since 2017, she has explored the reality of the present moment, focusing on themes such as loss of control, collapse, acceleration, chain reactions and more recently, phase transitions and transformation.

In her first intaglio project, Agathe de Bailliencourt has created a series of two etchings titled Pre-delay. These two works build upon her previous exploration, which began with a series of ink drawings compiled under the title Split Focus. Here, she refers to an optical lens often used in filmmaking to achieve the effect of expanding the depth of field, allowing both the foreground and background to be in focus simultaneously.

With Pre-delay, Agathe de Bailliencourt alludes to the phenomenon known in the world of audio as the vibrating echo of a sound. Upon closer inspection of the etchings, it becomes clear that each motif is composed of two distinct parts. The copper plates, which expand from left to right, are treated with two different etching techniques: spit-bite and sugar lift aquatint. While the right side of the composition presents a solid, jet-black brushstroke, the left side shifts character, appearing as a subdued mirror image of what is seen on the right. The depth of field varies here from textured, fleeting, and blurred graphite gradients to sharp, graphic strokes that culminate in a color. The physical interval between the two states adds a spatial dimension and a cinematic language reminiscent of filmstrip frames. The softness of the spit-bite technique contrasts beautifully with the graphic sharpness of the sugar lift aquatint, whose color shifts at the edge. The color acts as an unexpected rupture - an interference between the traditional etching techniques used to produce the work and today's widespread digital reproduction methods.