Visiting artist professor

2012 - 2013

Nicolas Moulin

Born in 1970 in Paris (France)

My work concentrates on the practice of urban and suburban landscape and deploys a world in which abandoned modernism cohabits with entropy and failed utopias. Rather than produce documentary work, I seek to question our phantasmagorical relation to reality and to the projections made by our societies regarding their own future. I proceed by distorting the image, changing the references and playing on illusion and appearances. Urban space intrigues me as an expression of ideologies and catalyst of social passions. I derive my photographic "raw material" from my travels and experience on the ground. I first took up this "practice of landscape" in Berlin in the late 1980s, then continued in other countries of the former Eastern Bloc, after 1989. In 1997 I joined the gallery Chez Valentin, which I still work with today. I have on occasion explored "experimental" set-ups combining lowand hi-tech with no obvious hierarchy, notably in Visiover (1997), Metane (1998), and Novomond-Pole (2000*). Viderparis* (2001) is my first piece of photomontage. In 2002 I spent a year in Iceland, where I made the performance Topokosm. A crossing of a monochrome, monotonous desert, like an absurd raining, following an earlier installation based on the same principle at the Transpalette in Bourges, LDRPE (2002), designated as a training for something indeterminate.


WORKS PRODUCED AT LE FRESNOY