Nicolas Ruel — City Scape — Projet 8 secondes — Seine 51 Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: April 28 → June 4, 2011

Seine 51 gallery presents the secound round of the “ 8 seconds ” serie on stainless steel of the canadian photographer Nicolas Ruel.

“Any urban space, from a village to a megalopolis, furnishes my work with the fictional raw materials for transfiguration.
I take a formal approach to photography, based on urban design and architecture. Structuring and disarticulating these elements is the predominant theme of my work.

I am fascinated by transitory and transitional sites-places that in their nature and function incarnate motion and metamorphosis, such as ports, terminals, docks, highways, construction sites, churches, and stadiums.

These spaces belong to a form of monumentality that when deserted inclines to material silence a vacuum in the world of things and beings.

For a number of years I have been using very long exposures that function like a movie set, condensing each photograph into a kind of 8-second micromovie.

This long exposure makes it possible to assemble key moments in a single take, analogous to the process of condensation in dreams.

Thus, in this dolly shot, I translate the actions and spectacle of the city and its residents as I follow their unceasing movement.

Through each exposure, I intensify a symbolic charge, which I then recombine in order to reverse the codes attached to the photographed real.
And because I print onto stainless steel, I need to take into account a sculptural reality, as if my work were an image being crystallized.

I photograph the city in the knowledge that the metal, like a prism, is going to change reality in its turn. So it is that the imaginary cities I inventory fall into place."

Nicolas Ruel