Paris - La Seine

The gallery presents the exhibition “Paris – La Seine”, gathering the works of Frédéric Stucin and Enzo Mianes in a crossed dialogue around their perception of the poetic power of the Seine.

In his two latest photographic series, Frédéric Stucin immerses us in enigmatic nocturnal atmospheres which he carefully constructs, following a process close to the day for night technique in cinema. He photographs during the day, always before nightfall, dissimulating lights which give the chosen setting the appearance of a movie set or a photography studio.

In La Source, Stucin proposes to follow the river’s course and to explore its surroundings, up until its source. This series turns the Seine into an unreal and symbolic place, which Stucin immerses in a halo of strangeness and mystery. Rather than mapping or inventorying, this work deploys the fictional power of the Seine and its banks, upstream from Paris, and opens up a nocturnal imaginary populated with mysterious characters.

Following the course of the Seine, the exhibition continues in the heart of Paris with the series Le Décor. Using the same photographic style, Frédéric Stucin shot the empty streets of the capital in 2020. He photographed Paris as a desert, a city that has become “a decor, the gigantic set of a suspended film shoot”, according to his own words. We follow, from time to time, a few anonymous characters walking at a hurried pace in this twilight atmosphere.

In parallel, the exhibition shows next to these prints the works of the contemporary artist Enzo Mianes, represented by the galerie mor charpentier. By producing sculptures from objects found in the Seine, Enzo Mianes questions the river’s capacity to carry away fragments of our lives. His work is the result of peregrinations downstream from Paris, of collecting bits of intimacy and sunken treasures rejected by the city.

Following the river’s path upstream, inside and eventually downstream from Paris, the exhibition “Paris – La Seine” invites us into the fictional narrative of a slow drift in the meanders of imagination, backed by the memory of all the anonymous stories carried by the river.