Conceptual nominee

"Dissociation" is a series of photographs shedding light on the traces that live on after a person passes away, the thresholds between physicality and identity, virtuality and remembrance.
Immerged body parts scatter into pixels in troubled waters. A body appears out of its liquid matrix only to dissolve and merge with the water itself. As the water crystalizes, the body keeps merging with it, furthering this paradoxical encounter.
Photography, to me, is a mean to withholding traces of a frozen temporality. I expand upon its symbolism through my work, which tackles the structure of this medium, exploring its materiality and its visual composition.
A variety of pixels put together become one: an image. This fundamental architecture mirrors the atomic composition of organic matter, molecules and cells.

Pierre Barbrel was born in 1991. He works and lives in Paris.
His photographic artworks are inspired by the narrative traditions of religious art and draw their references from syncretic myths.
Barbrel has always been fascinated by myths, tales and legends, particularly by their emotional strength, their philosophical and psychoanalytical elaborations.
He creates ties between the genesis of folklore and his own experiences and from that he builds a personal mythology.

At the core of his research is the incarnation of the psyche through the body, its traces in multimedia, its shadow in the cloud expanding the existence beyond death. His work explores the identity of the digital photographic medium, building bridges between the structure of digital images, the architecture of pixels and the organization of matter.
He uses photography as sublimation, a fight against pain, against oblivion, against death.

Barbrel tackles paradoxical concomitance in the digital media: body intolerance, censorship, abusive condemnation of nudity and sexuality and outrageous disclosure of information and unwanted images.

Barbrel’s work was exhibited 6 years in a row at the Grand Palais for ART CAPITAL. It was awarded a bronze medal in 2014, silver in 2018 and gold in 2020.