A little girl lost in the woods. A vagabond sitting against a stone cabin. A blond-haired boy in his hiding place, near a gully looking at his secret letters. A bishop in exile near a row of tragic buildings only remain before him a gigantic mountain and his faith.
Small, miniscule, Nicolas Dhervillers’ characters live in a novelistic landscape, a romantic realm, in a limbo of somber poetry. They make enigmatic, intermediary and sometimes dangerous journeys to places where the skies are as heavy as their sorrow.
Nicolas Dhervillers’ photographic tableaux are fictional collages; narrative montages. The artist selects a landscape, anaesthetizes it, modifies it, and then awakens it, enhancing its beauty, its strangeness and turning it into a theatrical décor or a filmic sequence. He touches on light, poeticises reality, and fabricates mystery and artifice. Within it, he invites women, men and children from the present and the past.
Archives or images taken from the internet, the figures are extracted, wrenched from oblivion and projected on to a world of high definition. From a state of movement they are halted, paralysed, immobilized, and trapped in a subdued and uncertain landscape. Engulfed in a dense and opaque nature, the characters wander and waver in a space where even time stands still. They are intruders, hangers-on, with no property or providence. Have they been saved? Are they in conflict or distress in the worlds in which they find themselves? Miniature actors, they are perhaps apathetic, disengaged and disillusioned. Escape is impossible. As they are introduced to a new narrative, they become the lost figures of a fantasy, a dramatization. In this chimerical landscape they are the anonymous figures of an imaginary ‘post card’ open to reference and quotation.
Condensed in the photographic canvasses of Nicolas Dhervillers, are the styles of 17th-century Flemish and Dutch landscape painters, the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich and the philosophical musings of Tarkovski’s characters (the character of Kris in Solaris).
Cinematographic codes, along with composition and filters, create a pictorial effect that broadens the theatricality of the landscapes and creates an image of Man, trapped between nature and his condition, somewhere between consciousness and sleepwalking.
Nicolas creates a metaphysical world, an alternative place that exists before and after the story has taken place, points of reference no longer belong to reality, to its promises and needs. Will the sleeping souls that pass through this experimental captivity, blurring into an invasive and impenetrable landscape, find some truth to the meaning of existence?
Julie Estève
Julie Estève is a journalist and art critic. Like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, she believes « if the world has no meaning, nothing will prevent us from inventing one.
Nicolas Dhervillers
My Sentimental Archives
Until December 17, 2011
School Gallery
81 rue du Temple
75003 Paris
Tél.0 142 717 820
