Artistic approach
Inspired by painting, architecture, literature and music, Nicolas Bruant developed his photographic technique from the 1970’s onwards and soon identified connections between each of these disciplines. The inspiration he drew from observing and listening to artists he considered “good masters” — those whose quality of work had influenced his generation — structured his perspective and empowered him to step back and refocus, a process he considers necessary before any photographic project.
Breaking away from the evidence and representations that build up with habit, Nicolas Bruant lets first impressions fade, those which would satisfy a less observant eye. He does not consider himself a witness and does not describe or authenticate. Instead of photographing what he sees, he photographs what he feels. For Bruant, photography is a means of liberating the eye from what reality imposes, a way of re-examining the world.
To this end, the photographer seeks to develop a particular “thread” that refrains from storytelling but, with precision, combines geometry and the balance of visual masses. Abandoning colour, he prefers a palette of light and shade. The use of black-and-white photography transports his oeuvre into the realm of abstraction, metamorphosing each element into a tiny part of a larger proof in which the planes merge together. From this, he produces a new figurative process, extracting the lines, curves and shapes he sees to offer up his own representation of the world. Each element becomes a tiny part of a larger print in which the planes merge together, and from which I aim to create a new figurative process, a new artistic reality: dunes become pencil-line undulations; the individuality of the zebra is translated to reveal a multitude of shapes and shadows that structure a previously indistinguishable reality.
Nicolas Bruant’s photography is not simply a process of abstract creation, nor is it limited to a solitary aesthete’s passion. Instead, it is a means of recounting the lives of the men and women he meets on his way, whom he holds in high regard. His many months in Africa enabled him to discover local mores from craftmanship to teaching in Quranic schools to the ceremony of the dead, capturing gestures, gazes, joy, suffering and inter-generational dialogue. Bruant always aims to go beyond the foreigner’s perspective, seeking to attain the very essence of the countries and places in which he stays. “These people have much to teach us.”, he says.
In the Château of the Domain of Chaumont-sur-Loire, Bruant’s deeply humanist oeuvre is represented by his pictures of trees, taken from a series on plant life that invites us to a discover a new perspective by highlighting the expressive nature of each element of the undergrowth, whether it is an army of trunks emerging from the forest floor in Compiègne or a field of baobabs in the land of the Dogon. Photographer-cum-architect Nicolas Bruant recreates the surroundings he sees to offer up a new composition.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
