Nicolas Ruel — On line only — Seine 51 Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 17 → February 15, 2014

For the first exhibition, On line only, Seine 51 gallery made the choice of the canadian photographer Nicolas Ruel.

About twenty photos from the 8 sec project are shown exclusively on line and for a limit time.

8 sec Project

“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