Nicolas Claris  ·  Romain Claris

NOIRS

La Vitrine / Valérie Coraini — Bordeaux
June 25 – July 15, 2021

Photo © Nicolas Claris — All rights reserved

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NOIRS

Where NOIRS honours light and colours…
The NOIRS exhibition was presented:
From June 20 to September 9, 2018 in the art gallery of the Relais & Châteaux Saint-James in Bouliac
From April 24 to 28, 2019 as part of the 10th International Multihull Show
From June 25 to July 15, 2021 at La Vitrine / Valérie Coraini, Bordeaux
In 2023 — new edition

Black is the origin. With the appearance of light, different BLACKS were revealed, multiple, sensitive, fragile but with such presence! BLACKS born from the deprivation of light, BLACKS reflections of non-reflections, a kind of anti-light that reveals colours, lights and materials. They emphasize, reveal, make us aware of riches so close. Magical, simple, everyday.

We took as a starting point material, spatial realities conducive to the imagination; one might be tempted to recognize skins, minerals, wine cellars, roads, mountains, water, sea, stars, charcoal, technical fabrics, bolt or dancer. But do we really need these eclectic identifications? They are only starting points, initializations, suspensions of time, like still images masterfully illuminated by the BLACKS

We are often close to abstraction, approaching the boundary between dream and realism in a curious, exciting and complicit approach. By combining imagination and reality, reveries and origins merge.
Because light is our brush, we wanted to continue playing, dreaming, searching even further… To pierce holes for light.

BLACKS
Black is not sad! It is beautiful because through its self-denial, it allows us to perceive, to see and to discover light and colours, and thus material.

In our culture, the relationship between blacks and colours is not as binary as one might think. If absolute black absorbs all wavelengths, it would be characterised by an absence of colour, but reality is quite different, much more surprising!

Very rarely pure, black is inseparable from colours. It reveals micro-details, tendencies, influences, so that each more or less luminous point makes us perceive one or several isolated or dominant colours, because it leans on the material, accomplice to the light. In this respect, black is not unique, it is fundamentally multiple.

But this multiplicity remains mysterious: we readily speak of "deep black" and curiously never of "light black": if it is deep, is black not also a revealer?

Such an incursion into the worlds of BLACKS is a fun, sometimes complicated but fascinating quest… To make light and colours burst from black, one must be attentive, curious, challenge preconceived ideas and question oneself.
Before starting our actual work, we must research and experiment, go back, move forward and not let ourselves be defeated.

At the birth of each image there is a real basis, regardless of its origin, what matters is the attraction that the final image arouses, its power of seduction, to take us elsewhere, into a world that each person can imagine according to their own dreams and imaginations. We simply hope that this exhibition transports visitors elsewhere, gently, and lets them enjoy the incredible and surprising riches of BLACKS

Gallery owner's words

Choosing to exhibit "NOIRS" seemed immediately obvious upon discovering the work of Nicolas Claris and Romain Claris.

First of all because I have always loved black. My clothing choices, my cinematic worlds, my taste for drawing, engraving, lithography, my inner world that ranges from black to white, and materiality, because it surrounds us, because it is part of my environment and because I see colour only through the eyes of others.

… I wanted to offer you an immersion into the light of these blacks of materials because Romain Claris's film gives us sensations, impressions of moments that unfold and transport us… Dark atmospheres, lights that reveal fleetingly, suspended moments of a gaze fixed on the trembling stillness of a drop of water, a free fibre… a breath of wind. Light gliding over an indefinable material, light like a brushstroke punctuating the images.

Choice of materials, choice of utilitarian objects that we might recognise, all, or that are part of everyday life: nuts, fibreglass, carbon fibre, charcoal, watering can rose, water drops, leather fabrics, skins, familiar materials in the studio. Nicolas Claris's photographic gaze magnifies the material, revealing its deep black through light and singular poetry, giving it full space in a detail of its material reality and offering it to us through the medium of a large format, an invitation to travel through each of our imaginations.

And because… "The sensitivity of the viewer is solicited in a completely different way when confronted with a form of 3 m² or 2 cm." Pierre Soulages.

Stills with Nicolas Claris, suspended moments that flow with Romain Claris.

Valérie Coraini / La Vitrine

Video

The film

Here is Romain Claris's film, an entry into the magnificent and dreamlike world of BLACKS
The film is presented in the gallery on a very large 4K screen.  Order one of the five copies

Awards
Official Selection Blow-Up International Arthouse Film Festival Chicago — USA, 2019
Official Selection Somerville International Film Festival — USA, 2019
Official Selection New York City Independent Film Festival — USA, 2019
Official Selection Retro Avant Garde Film Festival Venezia — Italy, 2018

The photographs

Format 140 × 105 cm. Prints produced by Lebolabo. Signed prints, limited edition of 5 copies.   Order a print or a copy of the film →

The authors

Nicolas Claris

Nicolas Claris

Co-founder in 1993 of Claris Image Builder — Photographer

"It takes a lot of maritime knowledge to give each boat its most beautiful aspects. It takes a lot of technical knowledge to master the recent art of digital. It takes a lot of humility to serve your subjects, not use them. It takes a lot of energy to take on new challenges every year. It takes a lot of academicism to know how to break codes. It takes a lot of respect to avoid the easy way out. It takes a lot of love to make generous images. It takes a lot of open-mindedness to be a great artist." — Bruno Belmont, Product Development, Groupe Bénéteau

In 2008, Sinar entrusted him with an HY6 for a year of intensive testing under extraordinary conditions. Now addicted to medium format (large sensors), Nicolas Claris became one of Pentax's rare ambassadors from 2012 to 2021.

In 2022, he switched to even more technologically advanced Fujifilm equipment — still medium format, with a 102-megapixel sensor delivering exceptional colour and image quality.

Romain Claris

Romain Claris

Claris Image Builder — Video Director

"If a wide angle shot is what we can all do, detail is what is lacking for our image-drowned eye with which we look at the world. Then, only then — the fold of fabric in a sewing machine, the stroke of a brush on a white page, drops of rain on a train window, the hand of a sculptor, a pebble becoming a jewel, the flexible foot of a dancer… all these things filmed by Romain Claris move us because they allow us to see a wider, richer, more complex world than we thought." — Jacques Dubuisson, Screenwriter, Director

Romain Claris has been creating short films since 2000, selected and awarded at over a hundred international film festivals. Graduate of the Conservatoire Libre du Cinéma Français in Paris, 2005.

In 2020, he co-founded the Bordeaux Shorts Biennale. In preparation for 2026: the documentary Les comptes de la lune, an alternative history of the invention of numbers and calculation.