Nicolas Comment is represented by Galerie Vu’.
Born in 1973, he lives and works in Paris.
After studying cinema at Lyon II University and the Art College of Lyon, he published his first photographic book, "La Desserte" (text by André S. Labarthe), with Editions Filigranes in 2001. It was followed by "Le Point" in 2003 and "A***" in 2004. During this period, he developed a photographic work focused specifically on “literature” in collaboration with Anne-Lise Broyer with whom he has run the publication "Saison" at Editions Filigranes. In 2006, he published the book "Fading," an attempt to recreate a sentimental portrait of Prague. Several personal and collective exhibitions in France and abroad have showcased his work, which, according to writer Bernard Noël, defines as a “diary of a look”.
At the age 30, his encounter with Rodolphe Burger brought him closer to the world of music (he works alongside Jacques Higelin, Yves Simon, Jeanne Balibar, and many other musicians), until Jean-Louis Piérot (ex-Valentins and producer of Daho, Miossec, Bashung, etc.) proposed to assist him in directing a personal musical project. The Book-Disc "Est-ce l’Est? Berliner Romanze," launched in 2008, is the first stage of this collaboration. These several disciplines allow Comment to stretch out his own “territory” to a “witty” practice of photography increasingly integrating both music and text.
"In 2000 I came first at Vitre. Patrick Le Bescont would publish the final book by Bernard Lamarche-Vadel, "Mise en Demeure" (with photographs by Jean-Philippe Reverdot). I was 25, I had just moved to Paris and Patrick had hired me as an assistant some time ago. The latest book by Bernard Lamarche-Vadel was thus the first book in which I participated: I had the script in hand and worked on the layout of text.
I already knew the critic and soon feverishly read all his books. It was obvious to me than anything since Camera Lucida Roland Barthes had been writing about photography in France that has reached that level of tone, panache ... But I did not know that beneath the mask grating was...
Nicolas Comment is offering an intimate and sensitive portrait of French singer-writer Yves Simon.
This collector book was an assignement from Barclay/Universal for the launch of the album "Rumeurs" in October 2007.
Story " In absentia ", intimate and atmospheric, done during the recording of the album " Amor Doloroso " in 2006 in the French singer Rodolphe Burger's farm in Alsace.
“Is that the East?” is a Berlin romance, a fix film, an imaged disc.
It is a musical and photographical ballad in the ex-East Berlin, haunted by the ghost of the Wall and totalitarianisms, but also by the music of David Bowie and Lou reed. Colour pictures associated to an EP concept album of six songs: Est-ce l’Est ?, Birgit, Tout autour, Baisers de Prenzlauer, Sur la Tor, and U-bahn, were produced in Berlin. For one of the first time, author photography and pop music – two “halftone art” – are put together in a coherent whole in this original and collector object. Visual and sound novel, “Is that the East? (Berliner romanze)” is as much a photography book as a rock record (produced by...
Carefully and thoroughly, Nicolas Comment began listening to the Czech capital, its streets away, its abandoned places, its quiet moments, almost deafening at dusk. The title Fading expresses a previously planned project by Roger Vailland but also highlights the mitigation of the unacceptable accumulation of sounds, images and gestures that invades the city. Once the background noise removed, the crowd departed, the horizon cleared of sensitive unnecessary images, it becomes possible to perceive the essence, the details that have escaped the frenzy ambient and we return like surrounded by melancholy. Bertrand Schmitt
The dust of time falls in the pictures, this way their content pours out in it and their substance becomes the one of a lost paradise. We think we watch a memory while we attend to the appearance of an instant, which seeks to incite in us its own following episode: the sequel of a history of which it was separated. This movement, from we feel it, disturbs our memory, and then there is it which pursues in the impression of a déjà-vu, as mislead. Is it someone, something, a country? It’s instead, and by turns, the knowledge of their fall behind the black and white thing, which softly snows. The return path stops in front of a curtain, which cut the space, and which is also in it. “Watch the...
Realised within the context of an artist residency, for the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the death of Jean Cocteau, those pictures give off strangeness, not “worrying” but inherent to those pictures themselves. Their content remains enigmatic, keeping the viewer in a doubt state, transmitting bits of comprehension to dip back the next picture into a vagueness form, nearby the dreaming.
For Nicolas Comment, it’s not a matter to show to his viewer photography in where the obvious fact would win: if some references are explicit (as the Welcome Hostel of Villefranche-sur-mer where Cocteau wrote Opium, or the presence of the horse head and the black angel of the film “Le Testament...
Someone is coming. Someone is leaving. As he doesn’t let a face, it’s the world that becomes to look like. Or, at least, a certain tendency for the world to make a sign when it goes pale tenderly. The thing is rare, of course: it appears hot on a passer-by’s heels, it lights its track with love. But, those ones who are seen on this track don’t already know who is passed by this piece of wall, who has smiled when he crossed those trees and has let float his smile, who has touched this hand or watched those ruins or desired in this room.
...
Wrecks: a blind mirror, a black handbag on a pink bedspread, a car windscreen in the twilight, a motel room, a young girl with a look brimming in a white riddle light...You just are the witness of an obscure business, in which lost knowledge loaded clouds exchange themselves. You think you travelled but you never leaved your bed. You were the toy of a distract genius that took the wrong vehicle: somebody has travelled on your place, navigated without your knowing it in the most protected roundabout of your intimacy, stool your dream, and leaved you on the other side of the sleep – among those wrecks – only evidences, now, that it had happend.
"In 2000 I came for the first time in Vitre. Patrick Le Bescont would publish the final book by Bernard Lamarche-Vadel, "Mise en Demeure" (with photographs by Jean-Philippe Reverdot). I was 25, I had just moved to Paris and Patrick had hired me as an assistant some time ago. The latest book by Bernard Lamarche-Vadel was thus the first book in which I participated: I had the script in hand and worked on the layout of text.
I already knew the critic and soon feverishly read all his books. It was obvious to me than anything since Camera Lucida Roland Barthes had been writing about photography in France that has reached that level of tone, panache ... But I did not know that beneath the mask grating was hiding a critic distinguished novelist and singular poet "[...]
Nicolas Comment (excerpt)
La visite | This book is a tribute to the novelist, poet, in short to the artist that Bernard Lamarche-Vadel was (he passed away ten years ago). The visit takes place in the places ( Vitre where BLV created the art library) situations (The Castle Rongère where BHL lived) , and images of "women-animal", freely inspired by the book "Sa vie, son œuvre".
Text by: Danielle Robert-Guedon Publisher: Filigranes (2010) 48 pages Size: 170x235
Est-ce l'est?
“Is that the East?” is a Berlin romance, a fix film, an imaged disc.
It is a musical and photographical ballad in the ex-East Berlin, haunted by the ghost of the Wall and totalitarianisms, but also by the music of David Bowie and Lou reed. Colour pictures associated to an EP concept album of six songs: Est-ce l’Est ?, Birgit, Tout autour, Baisers de Prenzlauer, Sur la Tor, and U-bahn, were produced in Berlin. For one of the first time, author photography and pop music – two “halftone art” – are put together in a coherent whole in this original and collector object. Visual and sound novel, “Is that the East? (Berliner romanze)” is as much a photography book as a rock record (produced by Jean Piérot and Philippe Balzé).
Publisher: Filigranes (2008)
Fading
Avec attention et minutie, Nicolas Comment s'est mis à l’écoute de la capitale tchèque, de ses rues à l’écart, de ses lieux délaissés, de ses moments discrets, presque assourdis, entre chien et loup. De là, ce titre, Fading qui traduit bien entendu l’effacement d'un projet autrefois projeté par Roger Vailland, mais qui souligne aussi l’atténuation de l’intolérable accumulation de sons, d’images et de gesticulations qui envahit la ville. C’est là, une fois le bruit de fond effacé, la foule écartée, l’horizon sensible débarrassé des images inutiles, qu’il devient possible de percevoir l’essentiel, ces détails qui ont pu échapper à la frénésie ambiante et qui nous reviennent comme nimbés de mélancolie. Bertrand Schmitt Publisher: Filigranes
La desserte
Wrecks: a blind mirror, a black handbag on a pink bedspread, a car windscreen in the twilight, a motel room, a young girl with a look brimming in a white riddle light...You just are the witness of an obscure business, in which lost knowledge loaded clouds exchange themselves. You think you travelled but you never leaved your bed. You were the toy of a distract genius that took the wrong vehicle: somebody has travelled on your place, navigated without your knowing it in the most protected roundabout of your intimacy, stool your dream, and leaved you on the other side of the sleep – among those wrecks – only evidences, now, that it had happend. Publisher: Filigranes