“Biarritz Paradiso” by Claude Nori is an exhibition at the Arrêt sur l’Image gallery in Bordeaux until October 28. Contrejour is publishing the catalog and presents it as follows:
Biarritz is not just a seaside resort, it is a theater open to the wild world, an apocalypse cinema at the same time as a chosen land for epiphanies. A paradoxical paradise, in short, which carries its own nostalgia while providing access to the famous “oceanic feeling” dear to Freud, that is to say, to a metaphysical promise.
Claude Nori moved there in 1999 to be happy there and make it his dream territory which he photographs, coupled with a creative nostalgia. The Italian dolce vita that he has repeatedly highlighted in his books sometimes manifests itself on the beaches bordering the ocean like a sparkling mirage. Biarritz then becomes Paradiso. But it was Jacques-Henri Lartigue who inspired most of his images. In the summer, he bathed every day on the beach of Port-Vieux. A century later, Nori perpetuates the tradition, just as he tracks down the shadow of his elder in his own images, walking in his footsteps, between the Hôtel du Palais and the Rock of the Virgin. A fragment of eternity fixed in an adolescent smile, the complicity of Isabelle, the beloved woman or a man contemplating the waves. The two ultimately took photography to its highest degree of delicacy and incandescence, archiving the simple joys of childhood, the accelerations of the present, the exhilaration of sea bathing and the crazy beauty of vulnerable moments. For Claude Nori, the vocation of capturing life in the present is less a testimony of carelessness than an elegant and polite way of recording the disappearance in progress.
Biarritz is not just a seaside resort, it is a theater open to the wild world, a cinema of apocalypse at the same time as a chosen land for epiphanies. A paradoxical paradise, in short, which carries its own nostalgia while giving access to the famous “oceanic feeling” dear to Freud, that is to say, to a metaphysical promise.
Claude Nori : Biarritz Paradiso
Until October 28, 2023
Arrêt sur l’Image
45 Cr du Médoc
33300 Bordeaux, France
www.arretsurlimage.com
