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Loaded Shine 18, 2008-2013
From June 8 to August 22, 2022
Centre Pompidou (Paris), Galerie 4
From June 10 to July 9 - Opening Thursday June 9, 2022
L'Entrepôt – Paris, France
From November 13th 2020 to January 3rd 2021
May-Picqueray Parc's gate, Paris
From March 10th to April 21st 2018
Galerie Les filles du calvaire
From May 31st to September 17th 2017
Círculo de Bellas Artes, Madrid
Was born in Lisbon, Portugal, in 1955
Lives and works between Lisbon and Paris
Paulo Nozolino is holder of the Higher Diploma in Creative Photography, London College of Printing (UK). His exhibition “J’étais là” was recently represented at ParisPhoto and the other “Make do” was represented at the gallery Quadrado Azul in Lisbon. In 2017, his exhibition “Loaded Shine is represented at PhotoEspaña, Círculo de Bellas Artes (Madrid) and in 2018 at the gallery Les filles du calvaire.
Paulo Nozolino is one of the central figures of contemporary photography. His journey begins in the 70’s in London where he went to live. Then Paris, from the late 80s and throughout the 90s, was his basis for a long series of travels across the Arab World, as well as Europe, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Books like Penumbra and Solo are good examples of his political concerns with a changing society. He returned to Portugal in 2002, after an anthological exhibition – Nada – at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris. In 2005, Museu de Serralves, in Porto, invited him to a new anthological– Far Cry – first time ever to show work by a Portuguese photographer.
A frontal artist, Nozolino sees photography the same way he sees life, using it to understand both the world and himself and taking it to the limits of his quest, his answers and his experiences. There is no room for complacency in his work. Destruction means destruction, death means death. Constant cycles in his historical time ‘par excellence’, the Twentieth Century, and even more alive in the present moment, as is stated in his most recent works, bone lonely, Makulatur, Usura and Loaded Shine.
Public recognition accompanies the artist’s work from the beginning. Awards such as the Villa Médicis (1994), in France, or the Grande Prémio Nacional de Fotografia (2006) and the Prémio Sociedade Portuguesa de Autores (2013), in Portugal, are reflections of such notoriety.
Paulo Nozolino et Stéphane Duroy
2015
ISBN : 979-10-94060-12-4
Stéphane Duroy et Paulo Nozolino ont en commun exigence et défiance eu égard à la capacité du medium photographique à rendre compte de la complexité du monde. Une écriture dépouillée, le refus de la dimension spectaculaire, l’économie d’images, sont des traits communs au travail réalisé dans le Centre Bretagne par les deux photographes. Ce travail interroge sans détour les pans « disqualifiés » d’une identité façonnée par des représentations et une imagerie relevant le plus souvent du « folklorisme ».
Les empreintes de vies ordinaires reléguées à la marge nous disent une autre « Histoire », celle d’un monde qui s’efface sans bruit, héritage d’une société paysanne en voie de disparition, interrogeant par la même les valeurs qui gouvernent nos sociétés contemporaines anthropocentrées et « virtualisées». Pour ce travail dans Le Centre Bretagne, les photographes ont arpenté un espace rural parsemé « d’entreprises agricoles » de plus en plus vastes et de moins en moins nombreuses, émaillé de villages à la vie sociale exsangue.
Les images de Paulo Nozolino d’une densité dans les tirages et d’une rigueur tendant parfois vers l’abstraction, nous proposent dans leur continuum une réflexion sur les destinées des sociétés humaines. L’absence de références factuelles sur le lieu de la prise de vue donne de plus au travail une dimension qui dépasse le strict cadre géographique et concerne bien au-delà de l’espace du Centre Bretagne.
Dans les photographies de Stéphane Duroy s’inscrivent, de manière plus concrète, la question du temps, de la singularité des lieux et la prégnance du fait religieux, fut-il de témoignage. Mêlant noir et blanc et couleur, Stéphane Duroy déploie son travail dans des écritures multiples avec toujours cette volonté d’être au plus juste dans ce rapport à une réalité dont le dévoilement est tout sauf évidence.
Paulo Nozolino
2011
ISBN : 978-3-86930-327-7
Makulatur is an atmospheric and sincere response to the death of Nozolino’s parents. Using simple but powerful symbolism the photographs lead us on a dark journey through Nozolino’s relationship to his parents’ passing. Smashed and decrepit, burning and ripped, the subjects swell with nuance, providing an insight into Nozolino’s outlook on the destructive yet poetic nature of death.
Paulo Nozolino
Rui Baião
2011
ISBN : 978-3-86521-861-2
A suite of thirty-two photographs by Nozolino accompanied by thirty-two poems by Rui Baião, bone lonely is a meditation on one of the most intense yet simultaneously subtle human states: loneliness. “A man stands in the middle of destruction, feeling unbelievably lonely. He makes deaf images during his blind walks. Dwelling with thoughts about the loss in all conflicts, the feeling that all systems fail and the certainty that nothing lasts forever. He wonders what light shines in loneliness, what sounds come out of a moving body, what can fill the absence. He has no answers. He sees silent panic, he hears reports on people, he smells the mould, he feels the flesh aging and he tastes the drysaliva in his mouth. There seems to be no escape. He has a word pounding inside his head: resist, resist… bone lonely.”
Paulo Nozolino
Ulrich Loock, Rui Nunes
2005
ISBN : 978-3-86521-122-4
Paulo Nozolino only makes black and white photographs and they are dominated by an impossible darkness that seems impenetrable to light. The photographs were made all over the world — notably in countries of the Arab world — but in the majority of cases it would be difficult to attribute a specific location to them. Photographs from Auschwitz are the decisive exception. Auschwitz appears as the absolute place and time that orientates everything else. In thirty years of a career as a photographer, Nozolino has constantly intensified his tragic vision of reality: this is visualised in pictures that originate from his own biography and travels; in pictures of men, women and children; in pictures of birth, love making and death. This publication assembles for the first time photographs from Nozolino’s different projects over the years, to form a new narrative, untold until now: the narrative of beginning and ending, and at the same time the narrative of his life’s work.
Paulo Nozolino
1996
ISBN : 3-931141-32-2
Edition Scalo Zurich – Berlin – New York
Paris Art, march 2018
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