Studio Marlot & Chopard — À propos — Slash Paris

The Marlot & Chopard Studio hold their first exhibition in the gardens of the Zadkine Museum in Paris in 1996 and in other several art centers in France. They then create a photographic series (Untitled, 2002) at the occasion of the National Exhibition in Swizerland (Expo02) in Morat. In 2006, the contemporary art center Le Passage in Troyes presents their solo exhibition showing, among others, the series Black Houses, where several prints are acquired by the National Contemporary Art Collection (FNAC) and the Regional Collection (FRAC) of Haute-Normandy The series Black Churches and the first shots of The Valley, most iconic among their work, are produced by the end of 2008 during a residency in Rhineland-Palatinate. The Black Churches will then be shown in several museums: the Kunshalle in Mainz, Germany, the Museum of the Abbey of Saint-Claude, France, the Malraux Museum in Le Havre, the Museum of Fine Arts in Calais; in festivals such as the European Night, European Photographic Identities in Arles, France, the Summer of Photography in Lectoure 2010, France ; and lastly at the Galerie Photo of Pôle Image Haute-Normandie where all the prints are shown together for the first time. The series entitled The Valley will be shown successively at the Museum of the Abbey of Saint-Claude, at the Photography Art Center in Lectoure, at the Museum of La Roche-sur-Yon, France — which besides purchased 6 prints in this series in 2013 — and in the Museum of the Queen Berengere in Le Mans, France.

Rémy Marlot and Ariane Chopard continue today their research on the architectural heritage with the series entitled Opera and Palais, or L’esprit des lieux — Montauban, while also developing their work on the landscape with the series Paradis artificiels, Souvenirs d’Italie or Paris-Rouen-Le Havre.

Their work mainly focuses on creating a fantasized territory, using through the series components the reconstruction of imaginary places or the juxtaposition of temporal layers, whose unity is aesthetical above all. Marlot and Chopard are keen to get the emotion that an unexpected encounter with the eeriness of a place can offer, also its significance with a familiar reference which provides its beauty, by visiting and discovering more and more places without looking back. Indeed, the images cherish multiple references to other art forms, whether it is painting or sculpture, and cinema or music for the videos, as well as personal anecdotal references which lay among the works like a life pattern or a way of being and thinking evolving throughout the possible encounters and other circumstances of life.

To fix the image is also a way to restore the encounter’s richness, to grab a moment of grace and give it back through the photographic object.