PARIS.- Anti-intrusion defensive battens with sharp spikes, devices of acoustic deterrent in cages and other bunches of surveillance cameras are what make up the ornamental syntax sustaining the greyness of our big cities, that, however, we dream of being green and quiet.

Once upon a time the city required some looking after, and one could see, at night and in the mist, the poetic bustling activity of a few men come to light the streetlights. It is now a time—the present time—when the management of the city has been automated, to the point when it is averse to the desires and gestures of people. Everyone is suspect and consequently perhaps guilty.

Reality has become more violent, colder, and Nicolas Lebeau takes it upon himself to devise an antidote to the gangrene. Facing the acknowledgment that the visible and the image, a fortiori photography, are closely related to power and predation, he chooses practices of distortion of the visible and its monitoring. The concrete expression of the desire for a transparent world, (1) wholly objectivised by the absolute Eye of the State that sheds lights on everything in order to know better, has accelerated. It is no longer ruled out, therefore no longer illegal, to imagine that sooner or later, to occupy the public space without being in motion could represent an offence, if not a break-in, so that the demands for dispersal and separation would rule. An atmosphere of manhunt prevails that, far from being enacted in the complex fabric of some jungle, has infiltrated the darkest alleyways of the urban space. Nicolas Lebeau reminds us of its violence by integrating in his visual vocabulary, the means of such a hunt, and produces, with the complicity of the musician Paola Avilés, a sound piece reminiscent of Mosquito devices, whose sound, similar to that of insect pest, is supposed to bother adolescent’s ears enough to disperse them in the context of urban violence. (2)

The artist also reminds us that such a hold can only be lessened by creating the art forms of a dissidence facing the ruling order. His work takes place between “revelation and concealment”, choosing the “safe value of opacity”, to use his own terms. (3) On printers he has tampered with—hacked, in a way—he prints distorted photographs taken between France and Brazil, whose damaged matter already indicates a practical possibility of resistance to control and surveillance devices. The figures and scenes evoked in his photographs show existences made fragile, unfit for the clarity demanded by the government of the living, and living in the shadow of its recesses: clandestine workers, Brazilian immigrants in Paris, young people at loose ends… They seem to be interfered with by other images that come to nestle in the protection they offer, picked now from the Telegram channels that contain a global archive of the conflicts and struggles produced by those who experience them and give them life before they reach more open regions of the visible and become public. Those “poor images”, (4) produced or reused by Nicolas Lebeau, draw their power from their flaws: they resist the necessity for legibility because they are damaged. Because they are light, “poor” in data, they are widely disseminated to oppose a counter-narrative to the ruling one of the media. When Nicolas Lebeau hangs them on steel rails or has them floating in plexiglas crates to transform them into sculptural pieces, their anchoring and weight make sure they escape the “eye-that-sees-all” (5) of the urban space.

Because “the images need one another”, as the artist wrote, to defend them against what Christian Phéline called the “accusatory images”, (6) they coexist with two other series: one, in its own way, performs the conditions of illegibility, gathering together the images treated in a programme of data processing that disturbs its source code and enclosed in a camouflage vinyl; the other, devoid of changes, is made of small formats produced in moments of praise singing of a religious community guided by a Brazilian pastor friend, like a “no” repeated in response, at every possible opportunity and ad infinitum to the surveillance and orders of the profane.

Nicolas Lebeau chooses the refuge of the sacred facing the outrageously profane language of surveillance and quantification; slow speed, loss, fragility against the dictates of productivity; existences drifting to escape the ruled ways of technocracy. As he reckons, it is there that are produced the “antibodies” and that appears the “immune process” against the violence of control. And he asks a question: do the monitoring devices protect us against danger, or do they invent and feed it?

— Guillaume Blanc-Marianne

(1) See: Emmanuel Alloa, Yves Citton, “Tyrannies de la transparence”, Multitudes, 2018, vol. 4, n° 73, pp. 47-54.
(2) On the use of sound violence, see: Juliette Volcler, Le son comme arme. Les usages policiers et militaires du son, Paris,La Découverte, 2011.
(3) Nicolas Lebeau, preparation note for the exhibition, unpublished, 2026.
(4) According to the expression used by Hito Steyerl : “In Defence of the Poor Image”, e-flux.com, January 2009, online.
(5) Grégore Chamayou, Théorie du drone, Paris, La Fabrique, 2013, p. 57.
(6) Christian Phéline, L’Image accusatrice, Paris, Les Cahiers de la photographie, n° 17, 1985