ERIC MARRIAN – CARRE BLANC
2012-07-09The series was an immediate success when first shown in 2005. Eric Marrian was clearly recognized as being original in the way he portrays the body and deals with the universal but difficult genre of nude photography.
‘Carré Blanc’ represents a new approach, which is sometimes endearing, always sharp and exacting, and designed to amuse. Marrian looks with the eye of the architect and celebrates the science of volumes and the geometry of bodies for the eye of a modern-day public that knows no taboos.
Above all, he shows a new body, shaped by the lens, a body he sees and reveals like the parts of a large puzzle and approaches like a playground; a body that is never shown in its entirety but in segments, fragmented, as if hewn from stone and usually pale in complexion. In short, a ludic, sculptural, exalted and self-sufficient body.
Part of the charm of ‘Carré Blanc’ derives from the fact that the series constitutes a humorous and poetic grammar of sensual elements, with imaginary landscapes and unexpected reliefs. They describe a region that is both familiar and untrodden.
With Marrian the female body, the photographic subject par excellence, is stripped of eroticism. It is tangible but pared down to all but the essentials. He chooses the game and the allegory, he celebrates the metaphors of the flesh. There is nothing obscene about exploring a body which has been taken apart and put together again, which with its intellectual games, charades and spiritual landscapes sometimes closely resembles the world of the surrealists.
It is also a spiritualized body, which hints at the presence of things and the spirit of the work behind the physical frame. The photographs give the woman’s body the sort of depth, density and texture that is rare with nude photographers. Curves which escape and spill out into melodies or into interrupted arabesques and broken lines, studies of curvatures and creases, hands and forearms folded over supple flesh, etc. Replete with nooks and angles, sections and perspectives, this body follows some secret geometric pattern
Opposite – Etude n°9, 2005
Exhibition runs through till September 1st, 2012
Young Gallery
Rue du clos des Rennes 20 – 74120
Megeve
France
