尼古拉·巴吉尔（Nicolas Baghir）

Visions III

The artist realized his vision after four years of research and 15,000 photos. His images, quite contemporary, refer to the pictorialist movement in their painterly quality. He works with film and prints on silver gelatin paper, using the traditional process. Named only by number, the blurred photographs retain a sense of mystery in the eyes of the spectator, who often travels far in space and time to a place where freedom from the need for interpretation leads back to the image’s irreducible beauty. The images are above all a study of pictorial beauty, an homage to painting that explore the terra incognita of the photographer’s oniric world

Variations 2.18

The vision continues to take shape with a new series, as a flux of serial disruptions and expressions of pictorial beauty that serve as a tribute to painting and photography that explores the terra incognita of a dreamlike photographic world. 35mm film on enlarged prints. The original intention must remain pure to maintain the process of this evolutionary creation. Moving from 0 to 1 (Visions I, II, III and IV, 2013-2016), the series passes  from 1 to 2 (Variations 2.18, 2017-2018) and soon beyond (Expressions 40, 2019-2021), with more to come in the near future. Up to 9. No further. Leaving the solitary trees of the plain behind to penetrate the forest, Variations 2.18 simultaneously arrive to break the cycle of strict black and white. The approach is binary, digital. Primary too. Pure like the silence of children playing. Open your eyes to a colored light, then close them long and hard, and look for supernatural colors with new forms projected on the retinal screen. Disrupted forecasts.

Healthy too. Do not be afraid of the forest anymore. Leave the city rat's robes behind to gain the nobler vestments of the field mouse. If only even for a few hours. The singular line of the horizon is broken by the vertical crossing of trees and their horizontal heights, the utopian inspiration for the City 2.0. Is the big bet to keep closing our eyes and refuse the idea that error is urban? I will continue to close my eyes to better see this augmented reality in the search of daydreams. Nightmares stink. This story is written in silence and is read over time.

Perturbances

These images are digital only in name. In fact, Baghir shoots using traditional B&W film and prints with a photographic enlarger on silver gelatin paper. The photographer visualizes his subjects in advance, using his camera and self-designed filters to record the envisioned image as a photograph that is then enlarged without being retouched. An homage to painting as well as black-and-white photography, his works are a study of pictorial beauty, with a subdued, painterly quality that exists in a tangible space outside of direct photographic representation and the fantastic elements of painting. This series was realized over the course of four years in which Baghir took over 15,000 photographs. Each photograph is titled numerically as a means of preserving the imaginative breadth of the image.
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Passeports Photographiques

Let the world be born again,
too many eyes beset it.
Pierre-Albert Jourdan

Landscapes - on endless fogs a light wavers in questions. A suspended time pours its drops of light. Airy regrets of blues and mauves veil the open space The Greco gray, rustling, is never far. The borders are vanishing. Let the sky flow, the sea in itself. Backs - despite scarification of the backgrounds, the offering is all the more naked. A body creates the space. And the rose, in its dolence, is equilibrium. And always, lights and colors stretched to our eyes like a bowl of hot milk. A fragrance of light. Thought then leads one life and the eye, another.

From the first contacts with Baghir's work, a conviction as powerful as it is sweet reaches us. A shock that does not result from any noisy process. Something intimate to our senses: water for our roots to gorge them with all innocence.

For those who already know his previous works, it will be easy to discern the links that ensure the continuity between the poetic work of Digital Perturbances and the pictorial work of Photographic Passports. The retina of Baghir composes in persistent, elegant, tenuous grace notes. We see as through the folds of an eyelid that would become canvas. The air is dyed with azures and moisture. Nothing stains the light. The air is a bath of colors. Chromatic tenderness. Silence waiting to be broken. Patience of the photographer waiting the moment, spared the painter’s repentance. Just encircled scars.
Passports, finally, so that an eyelid cannot be closed except in an epiphany. Make a clean place, without delay, for the sole sake of this quivering source and chance that flees us. In carnal mornings, the models of the photographer are the officiants, without their knowledge, of this grace. Baghir has never finished soliciting the visual experience. His virtuoso foreshadows what we persist in waiting for, what we would like to learn to receive. In this world that has become difficult to inhabit, Baghir's photographic work patiently lingers at the window like Vermeer's Geographer: "Let the world be born again, too many eyes beset it."
Martine Jobbé Duval

Untitled b&w