” ‘My sentimental archives’ attempts to create a link between past and present, reactivating archive images (the characters) through the filter of a contemporary approach, a prism of a landscape// constantly renewed urbanity. The old images are therefore coloured, cut out, copied and pasted : giving them a new twist. The new scenes reenact a style of painting where staged, everyday life sometimes lives alongside the strangeness of certain situations, and at others alongside the ambiguity of mingling of two time zones. The 19th century inhabitants become new ones, discovering the modernity of a town that used to be theirs, appropriating the places by acting out daily life. Appropriating both collective and photographic memory ties in with the desire to question the image in a larger sense, in a documentary conception without opposition to a subjective and contemporary image. This series plunges us into an other-worldly fictional space through photographic treatment that mixes artificial and natural light, photomontage, superimposition of shots, layers and other shams. The symbolic and mystical dimensions, as much for the treatment of light in the landscapes as the reuse of people (dead) who are, to all intents and purposes « alone in the world », lend to this photographic style a spiritual dimension, and poses the question of memory. Can we try and portray, photographically speaking, the present with the « ruins » in the Walter Benjamin sense of the term, of our inheritance and heritage ? “.
Nicolas Dhervilliers
Born 1981, Nicolas Dhervilliers lives and works in Paris. After producing a work commissioned by the Centre-Pompidou-Metz in 2009, his work was exhibited in 2010 at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, at the Rencontres d’Arles, and at the Galerie Bailly in Paris as part of the Jour Agnès B. with Massimo Vitali. His photographs are part of the permanent collections of FNAC, Raymond Well, Agnès B. and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. In 2010 he was awarded the Prix Special du Jury Arcimboldo and the Prix du Salon de la Photographie Paris.
REPRESENTATION
http://www.picturetank.com/
EXHIBITION
BIENNALE DES CREATEURS D’IMAGES
Docks – Cité de la Mode et du Design
34 quai d’Austerlitz
75013 Paris
France
May 31 – June 30, 2012
Everyday de 10am to 8 pm. Free entrance
Séverine Morel
[email protected]
