Galerie Fontana invites you to Les Ruines de Paris, a duo exhibition by artists Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre. The exhibition will open on Saturday 8 February from 16:00-18:30.
What if, suddenly, Paris—the City of Light—were to go dark, erased from the map, emptied of its inhabitants, like the deserted megapolis of a fallen empire?
Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, photographers of modern decrepitude, transpose this unsettling reality into our own. Galerie Fontana, having exhibited the artists’ series in its entirety – beginning with the “Ruins of Detriot” (2005 – 2010), presents the latest continuation, “Les Ruines de Paris.” The artists wander through the now-deserted streets of the French capital, subverting the iconography that defines its image. In doing so, they revisit the hypothesis proposed by American essayist Alan Weisman in “The World Without Us”(2007), which explores the consequences—particularly for infrastructure—of humanity’s sudden disappearance from the planet Earth.
This terrifyingly powerful AI tool of synthesis and imitation enables the duo to delve into the twilight imagination whilst reflecting on the role of photography as an optical device. To bring this project to life, they generated over 52,000 images, averaging 650 attempts per finalised image. In this collision of fiction and reality shaped by anxiety, the navigation between historical and personal references allows the photographers to delineate ruinism. They raise a pressing question: With human ingenuity challenged by the overwhelming rise of its own creation, is it now our material and physical human space that risks collapse? Are we witnessing our own obsolescence?
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Parisian-born Yves Marchand (b. 1981) and Romain Meffre (b. 1987) continue to live and work in the city. Their working relationship began between 2002 and 2005 after discovering a shared interest in photography and its potential to illustrate the rise and fall of our societies. Independentley-taught, the duo has been exhibited at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyon; Polka Galerie, Paris; MUDO Musée de l’Oise, Beauvais; Tristan Hoare Gallery, London; Maison des Arts, Antony; Cultuurcentrum Caermersklooster, Gent; MUCEM, Marseille; Witley Court, Great Witley; Museo Nazionale Romano, Roma; and the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco to name a few. Their work can be found in the collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Deutsches Filminstitut, Maison Européenne de la Photographie, the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, the JPMorgan Chase Art Collection, Fondation Carmignac, The Ford Foundation, and Fondation d’entreprise Hermès. Marchand and Meffre have been the recipients of prizes such as the Prix des Libraires in the category of J’ aime le livre d’ art for “Les Ruines de Paris” (2024) and the Deutscher Fotobuchpreis for “The Ruins of Detroit” (2012).
