His name: Jean-Noël Duru.
His exhibition, Fins de journées, is on display until October 18th at the Galerie Ex Nihilo in Grenoble.
He sent us his text.
You could say that I have always been drawn to things that are not flashy, colorful, or decorative. Those polished works that reveal everything at first glance. I like to find traces of strangeness where my mind seems to find a tunnel in which to travel. I never stop observing the visible, reconstructing it and arranging it in my own way to better interpret it.
A strange alchemy of fantasy and reality that gives birth to a universe to explore like a crime novel whose stories intertwine.
I believe my work as a visual artist involves producing images that foster reverie, emotion, and provocation. Images that share laughter, anger, tenderness, violence, sex, beauty, ugliness… mirror images held up to society. I like to reinvent reality.
I was ten years old when I began making photomontages. I collected my parents’ magazines, newspapers, and catalogs, from which I cut out characters, settings, and props with scissors, then staged them in different scenes by gluing them to cardboard. I felt it was a pictorial language that made sense to me, that I could use to communicate my stories, express my own reality of the world.
Images potentially have different meanings and resonances for each of us. The picture is only complete when the viewer brings their own perspective and grasps how a single shot a frozen moment can be transformed into a moving story.
Since its inception, photography has grappled with an intrinsic duality between supposed objectivity and subjective bias. My work lies within this in-between, between a documentary approach and a fictionalization of the atmosphere and bizarreness of everyday life. A form of narration through suspension and suggestion.
None of the images in each series were created using Artificial Intelligence (AI). All characters, landscapes, animals, and staging elements are real.
Jean-Noël Duru
Born December 25, 1951
In Chantilly, Oise
Studied at the Grenoble School of Fine Arts from 1968 to 1973, then worked as a visual artist and theater and museum scenographer.
Since 2020, he has dedicated himself exclusively to producing serial images.
In black and white and color.
www.jeannoelduru.com
Galerie Ex Nihilo
8, rue Servan
38000 Grenoble
www.exnihilogallery.org
