Nicolas Moulin

Since the mid-1990s, Nicolas Moulin's photography, video and installations have been interpreting urban architecture and landscapes, these being present as signs, not just of the memory and failure of
the telos that grew out of the industrial revolution, but also of what the artist calls our “skewed relationship” with reality and historical temporality. Whether it draws its material from the timeless realism of industrial ruins and vestiges of modernist architecture, or from the enormousness of urban development plans, or from the imaginative world of ecological disaster and the post-human projections of science-fiction stories, Nicolas Moulin's work edifies areas where temporality is paradoxical, reversible. It defines architecture primarily as a perceptional transit zone, a fictional reservoir that summons modernist subjectivity through certain incarnations that have now sunk into obsolescence.

It confronts our hyper-modernity's symptomatic relationship with its landscape, the memory of its monuments, the ideologies and utopias they refer to. Initially centred on a photographic relationship, the point of departure for Nicolas Moulin's approach was rooted in territory and reality, which were then subjected to editing, hybridization and source-grafting operations that imposed a distortion of a fictional nature. More recently, since his exhibition Vider Paris in 2001, Nicolas Moulin has shifted away from a purely representative relationship to architecture by incorporating a constructive dimension and has introduced a previously absent relationship of scale. Initially involving experimentation through digital tools – such as when the artist laboriously “walled” the buildings bordering the avenues of Paris image by image, or when he pieced together “composite” villages using an alternation of existing buildings – this constructive orientation gave rise to several series of sculptures that bring engineering principles into play.

At the gallery, we recently presented an exhibition in which Nicolas Moulin gave concrete sculptural and architectural form to some of his themes, which had until then been technically and conceptually tied to photography. Thus Steppterm could be summed up as an “architectural document”, an “architectured photography”. This series is a cross between sculpture and architectural fragment; in a literal way, it takes up the construction principles of existing buildings emblematic of Brutalism (the IBM centre in La Gaude designed by Marcel Brauer and Boston City Hall). Beginning from a “surface”, “photographic” relationship with these structures, the artist pieces together an interiority while preserving a relationship of scale (1:6). At once extensions and interruptions, these sculptures evoke a state of incompletion, or that of a “ruin”, echoing the contemporary status of modern utopias and their planned extinction. Relegated to the status of “abstractions”, they also assert their unbridled radicalism, unreconcilied with the world.

- Clara Guislain.