Eric Marrian

THE EXHIBITION OF ERIC MARRIAN

The 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.
We suspect it is a clever surveyor, disguised as a photographer, who has brought to life this dismembered and yet complete body, someone who favours the fragment over the whole, someone with an eye for detail, even for the smallest piece of skin or muscle, the tiniest hair, elevated to a sort of absurd poetry.
There is no lack of spirit in these limbs! That is what ‘Carré Blanc’ is about: nudity in which the grammar of the body transcends sexual nudity, nudity which prompts reflection and celebrates the metamorphoses of body and soul.

David Brunat

BIOGRAPHY OF ERIC MARRIAN

Born in 1959, Eric MARRIAN is an architect by training.

At the beginning of the new millennium he decided to return to his old love, photography, a discipline he hesitated about making his profession when still an architecture student. In 2003 he began work on a series about Saint Malo to which he still adds pictures. Later on he switched to studio work, producing medium and large-format prints. After that things moved quickly: he won the BIEVRES competition, was published repeatedly in photography magazines and had an exhibition of his own at the Salon des Artistes Français, at the invitation of the organizers.
At the end of 2005 he started work on the CARRÉ BLANC series. The first pictures from this series won him the main prize at the European Festival of Nude Photography in Arles in 2006.
His series about Saint Malo also won an award, the Leica Procirep.
The exhibition which followed at Galerie Verdeau was extremely successful. He was spotted by a Russian gallery owner (Gallery 2.36) who went on to show his work in 2008 and 2009. Furthermore, Olga Sviblova invited him to the Moscow Biennale where he was allocated a 400-m2 space. Since then his ‘Carré Blanc’ series has often been shown, both in his home country France and elsewhere (Galerie Verdeau Rive Gauche, Fondation ERA in Moscow, the Mostra di Venezia-Mestre, Les 3 jours de Drouot, Maison Européenne de la Photographie, etc.).
A number of advertisers know and follow Marrian’s work (Nikon, Kodak, Leica, DUPON). He began to take an idiosyncratic look at the fashion world and his first editorials appeared in 2010.

PRICES

Digital print on Baryte paper, Framed Signed and numbered by the artist

Size 100x100 cm ( 40 x 40 inches )
Edition of 7
N°1/7 : (Reserved for the Artist)
N°2-2-3-4/7 : 3 600 Euros (VAT included)
N°5/7 : 5 600 Euros (VAT included
N°7/7 : 7 000 Euros (VAT included)