Nicolas Baghir, Images-mémoires

"Nicolas Baghir, Images-mémoires"

from Thursday, January 30, 2025 to Saturday, March 1, 2025

Galerie XII Paris

From January 30 to March 1, 2025, Galerie XII is pleased to present the photographic work of artist Nicolas Baghir, through his exhibition “Images-mémoires”.

“Charred landscapes, emerging forms, figures reflected, disturbed, almost drowned :
with Nicolas Baghir, reality seems to be absent from the image, the better to reveal what haunts it: spectres, destruction, spirits. A persistent mist, a low
light or a trembling reflection capture the movement of a firefly:
appearance - disappearance, appearance - disappearance. The artist deliberately distances himself from the realism to which photography is often reduced. He transforms it into an art of illusion the better to reach the gaps, the strangeness, the fissures: by entering these between two worlds, we gain a new access to reality, to its woundedness, to its beauty.


Nicolas Baghir invents techniques for transforming matter, optical devices for
to increase the possibilities of the eye, enlarge the retina.Some visual phenomena are spectacular, others tenuous, almost secret.
But they always put photography in excess, making it overflow painting, abstraction, pure color, shadow theater.
They emit signs, a thought prior to the image.
What Perturbations numériques (PN # and PNC #) have in common with Passports (PP #) is that Baghir places something - a model, a landscape, an image - in the ice.
For the Perturbations, a photo is taken in a block of ice, then scratched and carved until an image in the process of melting appears, but which then has to be fixed by a second photograph, at the very moment when it disappear or lose its shape.
For the Passports, a Plexiglas pane is affixed to a painting - an endlessly recycled and repainted canvas - and the subject the subject's reflection.
The photographic eye creates the image from the murkiest effects of composition.
The subject is never even when it appears to be looking at us; it is always to the side or behind, which the “male gaze” effect, while at the same time inscribing the emergence of a being. We don't always know which era or world he belongs to.

The memory-images thus produced are not mirror-images. They say
something of the vitrification of memory, which returns transformed by the passage of time, sometimes on the verge of melting, and which we see moving through the composition.
The memory-image is an image-time: it fixes a passage where the subject without dying.”


Tiphaine Samoyault