around the lion of florencepainting by Nicolas André Monsiau painted in 1801, a ballet of characters moves to carefully fix the canvas on a wall in the Orsay Museum. Seeing them, one wonders if these people have not escaped from the painting: given their effortful gestures and their theatrical pose, the painter could well have integrated them into his composition. But it is rather the gaze of photographer Nicolas Krief, who captured them at the exact moment in which an invisible and miraculous dialogue is woven between the brave protagonists and the heroine of the painting: a mother who raises her arms to the sky and seems to shout at them: “Unfortunate, but be careful!” »
For more than thirteen years, this photographer who regularly works for the press has visited the most important museums in France and Europe to immortalize exhibitions behind the scenes, from the Louvre to the Natural History Museum, passing through the Grand Palais. What started with a request for the worldOn the occasion of the Claude Monet retrospective at the Grand Palais in 2010, it became a full-length personal work and a book published this fall by Gallimard. Museum, accompanied by an enlightening text by historian Stéphane Guégan, curator of numerous important exhibitions, who describes his profession.
A project in which Nicolas Krief applied his usual method: no staging, no additional lighting, no cuts. “I continue working as a street photographer, explains this admirer of photographer Larry Fink. I see a situation, I position myself and I wait… sometimes for a long time! My quality is to make myself forget. »
His images, full of humorous winks, multiply the coming and going between art and life, humorously cultivating the confusion between what the works show and what happens around them. Marble bodies sensually caressed by hands of flesh. A young man with long hair and the appearance of a musketeer appears in front of a copy of Caravaggio. A young woman dressed in exactly the same green as the lullaby by Niki de Saint Phalle…
fun distance
The photographer has let life and fiction penetrate his photographs from these works deprived of their pedestal and, therefore, of their usual arrogance. Locked in a soap-cleaned window, the bust of a young woman becomes a strange Medusa dressed in a foam snake. An empty black frame on a black background next to a painter all in white invites us to see a contemporary minimalist installation…
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