The Mark Hachem gallery is pleased to present to you the unique exhibition Paradis Perdu, a personal exhibition by Anthony Mirial. Anthony Mirial (1989, Nice) is a self-taught plastic photographer. He lives and works between Nice and Paris. Like a painter 2.0, Mirial uses the body as a witness, but above all as a sheet of paper, thus laying down his fears, his desires and his ideas ... From the end of his lens, he captures classic paintings in museums around the world before recomposing them on his own photographs; thus creating murky works that subjugate you with their plastic beauty and slap you with the societal and sacred themes addressed. After having exhibited in many international fairs (Fotofever. Paris / Scope. Miami / Scope. Basel / Start Saatchi Gallery. London ...), Mirial presents her third personal exhibition in Paris. The exhibition is divided into two series articulated around a common subject: travel. A metro trip that echoes another trip, death ... The first series presented, “War Wounds” (2016) features dreamlike characters, struck in the body by the attacks of November 13, 2015. Qu 'they seem liberated in the celestial ether, or else frozen in a stone riddled with bullets, they all bear witness to a wounded city, carrying in their body, by transparency, the physical after-effects of an ideological war ... "The spleen de Paris ”(2017-2018), second series of the exhibition, and presented exclusively, stands out for its work on reality; Mirial photographs strangers in the Paris metro, before bringing them back to her world, moving from a vision of the body (“posed”) to bodies (“stolen”)… A first for the artist! From this abyss of sad souls, empty or sucked in by technology, emerges all the sensitive beauty of this work. The composition of all this is unique: interchangeable paintings, made up of assembled metro cars, which, placed end to end, form a single, evolving work of almost 8 meters! In these two series, models and anonymous wander together, between dream and reality; lost souls, shattered, empty eyes, absorbed in uncertain thoughts. As if the artist infiltrated their solitude, their distress from within; or rather, ours! Between the filthy neon lights, under which he produced "The lovers of November 13", and the Parisian metro, Mirial offers us a surprising underground excursion from which it is hard to come back unscathed ... He (re) experiments this elsewhere for lead to a trembling creation, revealing to us at the same time as a devitalized Paris, its feeling of nothingness, its perception of the abyss. This metro, which once its doors close, becomes a reduced space, a condemnation to emptiness, a place of confinement which, paradoxically, does not lead very far, except in an infernal routine. Boulot Dodo metro station. Mirial reinvents her own universe here, through a strange journey, composing a double movement, that of travel, and that of introspection; a social and sensitive immersion in a disenchanted Paris. But above all, it is a mysterious universal journey ... Wonderful! At the same time, Mirial is currently preparing her first feature film; and thus, we understand better that his characters, who once seemed so solidly crystallized in the past, suddenly wake up, as if caught up by a modernity that has become inevitable with which they should now face. "Of breathtaking beauty, of great sensitivity, full of emotion on the edge of skin and entrails, his work uses a true language, extraordinarily contemporary, which catches our eyes and the agreed thought, and already marks its distinctive mark on the art history of our time. "- Simone Dibo-Cohen, President of UMAM" Anthony Mirial is at the dawn of his life as an artist. He shows great artistic fertility. The originality of his approach suggests a real mark on the history of photography in the 21st century. »- Hubert Konrad, Co-founder Art Price