From 21 October to 28 November 2015, the artist duo Clark and Pougnaud will be unveiling their new series ‘The Secret’ at Galerie Photo12.

The works that make up ‘The Secret’ are conceived as a theatre set, on which the stage curtain has just been drawn. Unreal and mysterious places are more evoked than actually represented; female characters, pensive, with immobile faces evolve in their interior world.

Through this new series, the artists invite the spectator to imagine and project themselves into invisibility: on the back of each photograph there is second hidden, intimate, carrying a secret. A ‘secret’ kept between the artist and the models and only unveiled to the collector’s eyes.

Clark and Pougnaud’s work shows, more than ever, a unique transversal approach: painting, scale models and photography. Their series is definitely contemporary, in the techniques they use, the choice of characters, the shades of colors and all of this with an acute sense of staging. Their approach is also deeply influenced by pictorial references of the 20th century: Edward Hopper, René Magritte and Surrealism.

If they had to be part of an artistic movement, it would be that of narrative figuration. However, in an epoch of immediacy, Clark and Pougnaud contradict this movement, by claiming slowness and scarcity.

Clark and Pougnaud

Clark and Pougnaud are a French artistic duo, respectively photographer and painter. Clark grew up in the photography environment. He was also his father’s assistant before opening his own studio in the 1980s. Pougnaud, coming from a family of artists, has been in the art world since his early childhood.

They formed their duo in the 1990s: Pougnaud imagines the stage-set, creates it and paints the decor while Clark photographs them. Characters are photographed separately and then inserted in the decor.

In 2000, Clark and Pougnaud were awarded the Arcimboldo prize, given by the Gens d’Images association, followed by an exhibition at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, and then in 2006, they won the HSBC award in the Photography category.