Baghir - Visions
Exhibition from July 1st to September 26, 2020
DIGITAL PERTURBATIONS: With their painterly quality, Baghir’s digital perturbations are above all a study of pictorial beauty, an homage to painting as well as black-and-white photography. It would take a lot of imagination, four years of research and 15,000 photos for the artist to bring his work to where it is today. He had a vision in his mind’s eye that he was able to transpose through his tenacity.
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His digital perturbations are not actually digital, apart from their name. They are traditional film photographs, enlarged and not retouched. In order to leave his dreamlike photos, open to interpretation, Baghir has decided to name them using numbers (digital perturbations), rather than names of places or objects. He thus maintains the mystery and freedom of interpretation in the eyes of the spectator, who often travels far in space and time.
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About the Artist
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Nicolas Baghir Maslowski was born in France in 1974. Baghir, the photographer’s artist name, was the first name of his grandfather, who died in his native Russia during the Bolshevik revolution in 1917. His father, in exile, emigrated to France as a child and eventually became a writer, giving a small camera to his own son Nicolas Baghir when he was 8 years old. As an introverted child captivated by images, Baghir took his camera everywhere, photographing everything that came into sight to create a personal photographic universe. His secondary passion was music. In the early 2000s he spent time in Jamaica, meeting several musicians who were more or less forgotten and created the label imprint Makasound/Inna de Yard with a friend. They produced and reedited a number of buried masterpieces, eventually popularizing the Jamaican artist Winston McAnuff in France. Many of visuals for the label’s albums were photographed and composed by Baghir. The label took off and eventually became a division of a major company, but in 2013 Baghir took a chance and made the decision to leave his successful career in the music business, return to photography, and fully pursue his artistic vision.
The artist realized his vision with his current series Digital perturbations after four years of research and 15,000 photos. His images, quite contemporary, refer to the pictorialist movement in their painterly quality. He works with film and prints on silver gelatine paper, using the traditional process. Named only by number, the blurred photographs retain a sense of mystery in the eyes of the spectator, who often travels far in space and time to a place where freedom from the need for interpretation leads back to the image’s irreducible beauty. The images are above all a study of pictorial beauty, an homage to painting and black & white and colour photography that explore the terra incognita of the photographer’s oneiric world.
His work has been shown at the art fairs Art Elysees, Art Paris, and Photo Shanghai and garnered him solo exhibitions at Fat Galerie/Sitor Senghor (Paris 2014), Swiss Art Space (LauSanne 2015, and Photo12 Galerie (Paris 2016). He will have his first U.S. solo exhibition in Los Angeles and another major show at Galerie Huit in Arles, France later this year.