Read
Behind the photographs.
A study in silence.
for Devoraran Magazine by Joan Cornelius Toset.
"This nothingness - to the chagrin of nihilists, purveyors of the apocalypse, worshippers of technology and other professional pessimists out there - is the best thing that could happen to us. Imagine that you are forced to watch three weeks of back-to-back reality TV shows. If you managed to survive the ordeal, the best thing that could happen to you at the end of it all would be for someone to turn off the TV, in other words, in the end you would see nothing.
As a great Hindu sage once said: sometimes the best thing to do is nothing. In face of the ridiculous and incomprehensible scramble called "contemporary art", this seems like a sensible choice. It´s not that our friend Brulat does absolutely nothing because, if that were the case, he wouldn´t be a photographer, but he does the closest thing possible for an artist: he tries to do nothing. And, in art, sometimes less is more. The little that he does is done with talent, precision, patience and feeling. Naked, our photographer braves places no one wants to go or is interested in: an arid Arctic landscape composed of rock and snow or a deserted city which at night becomes a forgotten, inhuman monster.
His three series of photos entitled "Primates", "Immaculate" and "Spotted" contrast his fragile, naked body with the silence that surrounds it, a silence emanating from harsh concrete or inhospitable glaciers. He shows the human being with no mask or form of protection, alone and naked, in a place he knows no one will disturb him, in order to test himself, to see if the city, ice, darkness and man have anything in common. As a living being, he talks to us through his naked body, telling us that despite it all, we are here, alone and fragile; but, as tiny as we are, we are life itself and that can be observed anywhere, from any corner of the revolting, depressing city to amongst depths of snow or on top of the most remote rocks."
Translation: Anna Holloway, Nuria Carriba
_______________________
TITLE Magazine says :
by Callie Rice.
"When I share with you. When I wake up and it is snowing. When I hear good music. When there is an accordion playing in the Parisian metro. When I meet a girl that is shy, when I look at her hair in the wind. When she smiles at me, and when I answer with a shy smile. When some rains flirt with faces in a warm day.” This is when photographer Ruben Brulat is undeniably happiest. However, this is barely comparable to the euphoric feeling of “trying to capture Humanity.”
Brulat’s distinctive images of the bare skinned photographer himself have attracted the attention of Title. “I don’t think that people are afraid of nudity. I also do not think that my work shows an obvious nudity. A body “Naked” out there, in the snow, a frozen lake or in the middle of an urban area, creates for me only this asexual Human, showing and expressing, our vulnerability, smallness, symbiosis and also beauty.” Capturing these photographs is a unique process. Brulat sets the auto timer on his camera after scouring the area for the perfect location, strips down and runs. What we were surprised to learn is more interesting than the image of a pure body lying in the snow. However, rather the way that body’s mind views the world; meet Ruben Brulat.
“Feeling an incredible mix of euphoria and adrenaline, I feel nothing. All the cold or pain is gone like inhibited by the mix of feelings. I feel everything. I settle my body. The time is like suspended. I feel at peace.” Brulat explains of his art. The average person, such as myself, would point to Photoshop. Upon learning that he actually performed these “stunts” I was compelled to ask if he had ever run into any sort of trouble in producing his art. The answer? Simply, “no.” It is difficult to understand the premise of his work being any more than shock therapy, looking to be the next big thing in culture slamming. He explains it repeatedly- nearly rehearsed in pleasantries; “putting my body on the shots to create an asexual Human that shows that we can be in symbiosis but also in complete dissociation.”
He goes on to discuss photography and inspiration, “First of all, photography is the only place where I feel at my place, where I feel I have a complete freedom. It is certainly a way to isolate myself from Humans because they simply fascinate me. I love looking at them, every move, every detail, every word they say. Then I consider each of those in the society, who they are, what are they doing... But quickly I consider the masses I want to understand why people in groups/society do that, how, and why they choose this direction.” Brulat’s fascination with humanity is braided throughout his words, often most denoted in the capitalization of the word itself. “They fascinates me, by their complexity that makes their beauty. That is why I will lead my path from the past to now and the future, to study them, try understanding them, mostly what are they doing the groups, the societies. Why societies are having a recurrent decision over the History. Why are they scared of death? Many questions are as diverse and complex as Humans are, and their path. Because, for me photography for me is capturing Humanity: expressing happiness, sadness, joy, despair, love, or pain, passion or frustrations; all of the feelings that makes us live.”
Brulat has an honest appreciation for the world around him; from the snow he sits on, to those he refers to as “Humans” rather than we, or us. That is until he is asked what he fears most: “We.” His self-proclaimed study of the species delves deeply into the masses- the Humans as a whole, yet the sheer concept holds his greatest fears. ”We. Because of all of the hope I have in us. The fact that we can do good and terrible things, the fact that we can imagine, invent and create. The fact that we can ignore, deny, and destroy. The fact that we can hate and abandon. The fact that we can love. The way that we are so different and diverse; I’m afraid because I hope, I really hope that we will never loose those feelings.” Brulat’s entire world revolves around his “subjects” in life, rather than he as the subject in his art. He encompasses this idea of sincerity, vulnerability, and mystique into a frame- all the while what is more interesting to him than his solitary finished product is the interactions that inspired it.
Ruben Brulat sees his art as a need, there is no choice given in the matter; only strong convictions he needs to express. “Understanding the other one, that is how I see it, in public or in my life. Another that will be able to understand someone else, from where he comes from, how and why the person behave this way, right now. Understanding that we are living with others, that people are influencing us, unconsciously in bad or in a good way: we consider them. All of us, creating who we are since our birth, those complex personalities that makes us unique. Understanding someone else at this level is entering in his intimacy.”
We ask the man who once aspired to be an astronaut, in order to “see the world from far away” to look ahead rather than at those around him, and explain what he wishes for the world. “I wish to see more and more inspiring leaders, not only in politics, people who will be able to bring the Human specie to get new perspectives, and hope. I wish to see more people realize the chance we have, to be in such a great and unique place; that we come from an incredible result of circumstances and from the long evolution. I hope we will realize it in groups, in societies, being able to change things. Being able to continue the long evolution, but I have no doubt about that. I am convinced that Humans are and in the end, or close to the end, good. Finding this force to live, and change things."
_______________________
Primates
by Dan Nisand, writer
Ruben Brulat’s approach has something romantic to it, romantic in the nineteenth century sense. His work ist that of a lonely, fanatic and mystic person, who’s thrown himself into a quest that confronts him to the limits and that opens the doors to a new apprehension of the world.
At one time, following Amiel, a whole generation had proclaimed "every landscape is a state of mind", directed its interest to unending perspectives, which were damaged like life itself, tortured like the human feeling. Fascinating, is how this new series of photos, entitled Primates, could be described.
Nevertheless, when a so-called Friedrich represented the human greatness as an anonymous silhouette absorbed in the show of a sea of clouds, Brulat, on the other side, does the complete opposite, by immersing it in reality. For Brulat, it is not anymore a question of evoking the greatness of a character, but that of Creation itself, where the human being, as a species, searches for his place.
Among the hostile rocks, the snow and the ice, barely inclined to welcome life, there is a body without identity, totally naked and deprived. Will he succeed to merge in this set, in this infinity of accidents? Will he know how to be similar to the animal that reigns on its own territory? This desperate attempt to transform this being into a body, for it to be accepted or re-accepted by a matrix completely foreign to the human substance, is very moving. This is when he is nothing but a species, a man from thousands of years ago, forced to know himself and to adapt himself to the outside conditions which are nothing but threats.
Because it is impossible to disregard the conditions of how these pictures were taken, the risk-taking, the intense emotion, the spectacular and the exploration of the limits are tangible. We perceive that the artist answers to all his instincts, that he offers himself entirely and allows himself to be reached by things. If sometimes a pillow of snow seems more welcoming, softer, the spectator cannot repress the shiver that activates in him this defenseless subdued body and devoured by elements. He feels the urgency, the impossiblity to think, but also the speed and the unexpected sensual delight of the action.
Certainly, he doesn’t create the illusion that the fusion with the nature is possible without fight or conditions. But this series recounts a collection, with its set of disappointed hopes and aborted attempts, and at the end of the road, a figace but an indisputable triumph, even if for a split of a second, to be able to create the symbiosis: when the human being, as if calmed, seems to become confused with a rocky mass of fallen rocks, to float serenely on the surface of a black groundwater beside a crust of ice, or to find refuge in the hollow of a carpet of sweet grass, in the dense and deep green.
_______________________
Raise Magazine says :
by Stéphanie Masson
1 / Nu, presque au centre. Couché là sur le côté, on ne voit pas son visage - trop loin petit homme perdu dans l’immensité. Dans l’herbe qui ondule, doucement. Les ondulations de ce vert intense qui glisse sous son corps, et tout autour, petit corps d’homme bercé par ce tapis épais, souple, par ce vaste espace ; cette grande nature impassible, triomphante. Ces rochers gris et coupants, massifs, comme un mur infranchissable, barrière protectrice de cette menue tache d’homme posée là entre deux blocs, avec sa peau nue. Presque blanche.
2 / Mais pas un souffle. Silence absolu, le corps de l’homme sur les rochers cette fois, la neige, l’eau gelée comme un ciel renversé, bleu gris et dur comme un autre versant de la montagne, un autre côté de cette nature hostile, sauvage ; absolument libre d’elle-même, et de ce qu’elle produit. Absolument libre de ce petit corps humain sans force, ni volonté - et dans cette lumière morne, ces nébuleuses blanches autour du corps jeté, cassé de l’homme à peine né, que déjà violenté. Terrible vie qui commence.
3 / Aussi, le petit homme embrasse. Le petit homme cherche la chaleur, son corps abandonné, avide : il veut se fondre à nouveau. Son tout petit corps écarté largement sur les roches sinueuses, organiques - son tout petit corps invisible, oui à peine si on le voit, véritablement, il faut bien regarder ; à peine si l’homme vit encore dans cette grande beauté, ce grand univers, toute l’image remplie, dentelle grise et rude, froide, et puis brune. Et lui.
4 / Mais rien. Non, plus dur encore, plus froid, la vie ne continue pas elle se brise, se recouvre d’un épais manteau neigeux et noirci, aussi, le pauvre petit homme se replie ; se recourbe sur la glace : fœtus tremblant sur cette langue de neige sale, vrillée, et cerclée de masses noires, violentes, là le petit homme plus petit encore, plus fragile, ne sait plus. Ne reconnaît plus ce monde d’où il vient, où il se trouve ; le corps à l’intérieur de lui- même. La grande solitude.
5 / Voilà donc la fin. Ou le retour. Le liquide bleu et froid, sombre, enfin là où le petit homme se plonge, son corps enseveli, flottant. Qui coule, dans cette eau que l’on sent glacée. Pénétrante. Cette ombre sourde de la montagne qui se dessine, et juste après la neige, bordure menaçante - et tout près du corps qui n’en a plus pour très longtemps. Et voilà donc où nous en sommes. Et c’est donc la fin.
_______________________
Wallpaper* Magazine says :
by Nancy Aslop.
For Brulat, photography is about capturing humanity expressing convictions– as was evidenced in Immaculate and Primates, his series of images of a business area and the relationship between Human beings and their environment by day and by night, using his naked body to create those powerful scene. Brulat says “I want to understand why people, groups and societies behave the way they do.”
“What shocked me with Immaculate was that this neighborhood lived just for a system, and when at night the system stops, when there is no need to activate it, it simply dies, a system created by Humans, sustained by Humans leave absolutely no love, no happiness, no sadness. No place to any kind of living.
I am fascinated by places where the beauty of Human beings has gone.”
It makes sense then that Brulat focused his attentions on a series of photographs about the Human in the environment, depicting ‘the vulnerability and the smallness of our species.’ Showing a small figure facing the threats of an hostile environment. In ten years time, he hopes to have brought both happiness and sadness to people via his work, but most of all hopes that not all his expectations will come to fruition.
‘Otherwise, in a way, it will be really boring!’
And that’s one adjective we would not associate with Brulat.”
_______________________
Immaculate
by Dan Nisand, writer
"Every night, the leaving of all the businessman and employees of the business district “la Défense”, turn it into a no man’s land. Because at night, this international economic center, made of an agglomerate of business towers grown like a steel forest on a gigantic pedestrian flagstone, becomes an outskirts, an urban desert without even a soul to haunt it.
It’s this ghost town that doesn’t seem to wait for anything, that the photographer Ruben Brulat explores, night after night, from footbridge to parking lot, from floors to stairs. Each snapshot has required from the artist dozens of hours of wandering, until he finds a spot whose nothingness strikes a chord in him; a place where the light, the architecture, the materials and the relief create an incongruous and tragic scenery. Afterwards, there’s still hours of observation, impregnation, dreaming. But when the vision appears, it immediately becomes desire, a pressing demand to achieve. To reach this paradoxical symbiosis that he is so gifted to create, the artist has the urge to get naked right here, right now. He has to take possession of the place at all costs; he has to project himself as a human being. Leaving without going all the way is out of the question; it would be fault. The photographer then, founds himself truly naked in his own lens, buried in his own eye.
To fully understand Ruben Brulat, you have to put yourself in the place of this lonely being, who explores every corner of this silent labyrinth, and who suddenly decides, in the middle of the night, to offer himself to the coldness of a place, alone and naked, to make one with the steel, glass and concrete. Just imagine his quest, how he hunt down the right location, imagine the adrenaline running through his veins when he gets undressed and offers his fragile and vulnerable body to the horror of a soul and history-less place.
Ruben Brulat can’t stop himself from exploring every corner of this unique district, he forbids himself to neglect any parcel and it shows in its photography where no detail is left out. Precise to the excess, exploring each centimeter of this too bright or, at the contrary, too quickly damaged spaces. The shadows of the skeletal empty towers are scrutinized to the very depths of them and reveal they gigantic and abandoned reliefs. In the middle of the composition, a naked human body, successively fragile, tortured, in a dream, describes the human life that rises in the most hostile environment.
We are at the heart of the biggest European business Center and there is nothing. The power system lies dormant, waiting for the creatures with flesh and feelings to reactivate it. It seems as if only the Economy, feeding herself with numbers, networks and transactions, manages to survive in this environment. While we, the humans, living on the feelings, sensations, even suffering – all what’s precisely absent from this place – aren’t allowed.
From one photography to the other, a metaphor is made. It becomes clear that where the economical power triumph no life being belongs there. The life that irresistibly and happily insinuate itself everywhere, has been driven away. Even the vegetation, placed there by a program, seems to suffocate in her constraint. Even when she forces herself to take her rights back in the spots the town planning has forgotten, her small victories make the life look like a macabre and obscene phenomenon.
At first sight, the Immaculate series comes under conceptual photography. And yet, the presence of an humble and discreet body, naked without being provocative, sexless, unidentified, makes it a different sort of representation. Strangely, a certain beauty emerges from this ugliness. Is it because of the body ? Because of the strong inspiration of the photographer ? Sometimes, during his nightly wandering, Ruben Brulat encounters a lonely, ghostly, exhausted or grief-stricken soul. Suddenly, a shy and strange “Good evening” rings in the silence. Humanity, after all. Maybe that’s where it comes from, the utter happiness, the feverish euphoria, that takes over the artist, when he takes home one of these eerie/ supernatural snapshot/photography, from the victory of having took a portrait of the humanity out of this place that deprives the life of its essentials rights."
_______________________
The omega Man
by Oscar Gomez from Vnfold Poviña
Ruben Brulat's photographs tells us about a time in which man has already become precarious. Images of a Parisian that augur most of his time remotly and lonely.
Each images have the power to evoke ideas without saying a word. A series of photographs that gives movement to the original idea each ones creating a story. It's easy to find some in Ruben's series, small narrative forms that evoke feelings of fragility, smallness, life and death. The artist's naked body, tiny in the great outdoors, irrevocable recounts the loneliness of the last man and the infinite potential of the first.
Still, the presence of this being checked out is kept constantly re-signify and rethink the scenarios to their own place in the world. "Humans are part of nature," says Ruben, "and we need to understand how to behave with her. I needed to represent not a single individual, the human body needed to be like everyone else. So I turned myself in a sort of "bestial mode". With the need to show and express that the man may be in symbiosis, but also in complete dissociation. That he is able to sustain and behave not only with his needs but also with those of all the life that surrounds it and from where ever he emerged. "
These series dealing with these portraits are his last two. On the one hand, Immaculate contrasts the fragility with this bodies on stage naked with a commercial district inhospitable and uninhabited. On the other hand, the series Primates returns Human in nature, with the same dyes and contrasts between immense spiritual and Human deprivation that made Tarkovsky film, Stalker. In this case, the reference is not in vain: "Stalker is one of my favorite movies. The talented Tarkovsky is one of the most brilliant directors, able to plunge your mind into deep emotions, not just superficial. Today, I love the Coen brothers, Gus Van Sant and Soderbergh. Podes you sit with them to watch a movie and you know they're going to take you smartly from one point to another."
Just two years ago Ruben bought his first camera, and an inevitable technical development is seen in their work. However, technically it is not for more than one way to address the ideas. "Photography is just a tool. What i have an intense relationship with is my convictions and the things I need to talk about. For some time I have this energy and two years ago i found ways to channel it in photographs that explained a point of view. The technical growth only shortens the distance between what I have in the head and its limits. "
His method also carries with it the story of his realization. Ruben works alone. He find the locations indicated, prepare the camera, set the timer, take off the clothes and run out into the cold, darkness and water to pose for the pictures. There is some sense of ritual, almost shamanic, throughout the process. Connect with other reality is, somehow, connect with the hidden side of our own world. "I use the fact that i never transformed portraiture in my work. I always use something that exists. So I think photographs are a concept, where ideas, concepts, and point of views, comes from the people. Watching them every day, looking, trying to understand. I love all living things and their behavior. "
Whatever the story behind Ruben and trying to express ideas, his way of talking about them is so strange and fascinating. His language stripped and early paints him as a man posthumous humanity, as a secular priest in a world without the Creator. Invites the mystery, as his own work.
A study in silence.
for Devoraran Magazine by Joan Cornelius Toset.
"This nothingness - to the chagrin of nihilists, purveyors of the apocalypse, worshippers of technology and other professional pessimists out there - is the best thing that could happen to us. Imagine that you are forced to watch three weeks of back-to-back reality TV shows. If you managed to survive the ordeal, the best thing that could happen to you at the end of it all would be for someone to turn off the TV, in other words, in the end you would see nothing.
As a great Hindu sage once said: sometimes the best thing to do is nothing. In face of the ridiculous and incomprehensible scramble called "contemporary art", this seems like a sensible choice. It´s not that our friend Brulat does absolutely nothing because, if that were the case, he wouldn´t be a photographer, but he does the closest thing possible for an artist: he tries to do nothing. And, in art, sometimes less is more. The little that he does is done with talent, precision, patience and feeling. Naked, our photographer braves places no one wants to go or is interested in: an arid Arctic landscape composed of rock and snow or a deserted city which at night becomes a forgotten, inhuman monster.
His three series of photos entitled "Primates", "Immaculate" and "Spotted" contrast his fragile, naked body with the silence that surrounds it, a silence emanating from harsh concrete or inhospitable glaciers. He shows the human being with no mask or form of protection, alone and naked, in a place he knows no one will disturb him, in order to test himself, to see if the city, ice, darkness and man have anything in common. As a living being, he talks to us through his naked body, telling us that despite it all, we are here, alone and fragile; but, as tiny as we are, we are life itself and that can be observed anywhere, from any corner of the revolting, depressing city to amongst depths of snow or on top of the most remote rocks."
Translation: Anna Holloway, Nuria Carriba
_______________________
TITLE Magazine says :
by Callie Rice.
"When I share with you. When I wake up and it is snowing. When I hear good music. When there is an accordion playing in the Parisian metro. When I meet a girl that is shy, when I look at her hair in the wind. When she smiles at me, and when I answer with a shy smile. When some rains flirt with faces in a warm day.” This is when photographer Ruben Brulat is undeniably happiest. However, this is barely comparable to the euphoric feeling of “trying to capture Humanity.”
Brulat’s distinctive images of the bare skinned photographer himself have attracted the attention of Title. “I don’t think that people are afraid of nudity. I also do not think that my work shows an obvious nudity. A body “Naked” out there, in the snow, a frozen lake or in the middle of an urban area, creates for me only this asexual Human, showing and expressing, our vulnerability, smallness, symbiosis and also beauty.” Capturing these photographs is a unique process. Brulat sets the auto timer on his camera after scouring the area for the perfect location, strips down and runs. What we were surprised to learn is more interesting than the image of a pure body lying in the snow. However, rather the way that body’s mind views the world; meet Ruben Brulat.
“Feeling an incredible mix of euphoria and adrenaline, I feel nothing. All the cold or pain is gone like inhibited by the mix of feelings. I feel everything. I settle my body. The time is like suspended. I feel at peace.” Brulat explains of his art. The average person, such as myself, would point to Photoshop. Upon learning that he actually performed these “stunts” I was compelled to ask if he had ever run into any sort of trouble in producing his art. The answer? Simply, “no.” It is difficult to understand the premise of his work being any more than shock therapy, looking to be the next big thing in culture slamming. He explains it repeatedly- nearly rehearsed in pleasantries; “putting my body on the shots to create an asexual Human that shows that we can be in symbiosis but also in complete dissociation.”
He goes on to discuss photography and inspiration, “First of all, photography is the only place where I feel at my place, where I feel I have a complete freedom. It is certainly a way to isolate myself from Humans because they simply fascinate me. I love looking at them, every move, every detail, every word they say. Then I consider each of those in the society, who they are, what are they doing... But quickly I consider the masses I want to understand why people in groups/society do that, how, and why they choose this direction.” Brulat’s fascination with humanity is braided throughout his words, often most denoted in the capitalization of the word itself. “They fascinates me, by their complexity that makes their beauty. That is why I will lead my path from the past to now and the future, to study them, try understanding them, mostly what are they doing the groups, the societies. Why societies are having a recurrent decision over the History. Why are they scared of death? Many questions are as diverse and complex as Humans are, and their path. Because, for me photography for me is capturing Humanity: expressing happiness, sadness, joy, despair, love, or pain, passion or frustrations; all of the feelings that makes us live.”
Brulat has an honest appreciation for the world around him; from the snow he sits on, to those he refers to as “Humans” rather than we, or us. That is until he is asked what he fears most: “We.” His self-proclaimed study of the species delves deeply into the masses- the Humans as a whole, yet the sheer concept holds his greatest fears. ”We. Because of all of the hope I have in us. The fact that we can do good and terrible things, the fact that we can imagine, invent and create. The fact that we can ignore, deny, and destroy. The fact that we can hate and abandon. The fact that we can love. The way that we are so different and diverse; I’m afraid because I hope, I really hope that we will never loose those feelings.” Brulat’s entire world revolves around his “subjects” in life, rather than he as the subject in his art. He encompasses this idea of sincerity, vulnerability, and mystique into a frame- all the while what is more interesting to him than his solitary finished product is the interactions that inspired it.
Ruben Brulat sees his art as a need, there is no choice given in the matter; only strong convictions he needs to express. “Understanding the other one, that is how I see it, in public or in my life. Another that will be able to understand someone else, from where he comes from, how and why the person behave this way, right now. Understanding that we are living with others, that people are influencing us, unconsciously in bad or in a good way: we consider them. All of us, creating who we are since our birth, those complex personalities that makes us unique. Understanding someone else at this level is entering in his intimacy.”
We ask the man who once aspired to be an astronaut, in order to “see the world from far away” to look ahead rather than at those around him, and explain what he wishes for the world. “I wish to see more and more inspiring leaders, not only in politics, people who will be able to bring the Human specie to get new perspectives, and hope. I wish to see more people realize the chance we have, to be in such a great and unique place; that we come from an incredible result of circumstances and from the long evolution. I hope we will realize it in groups, in societies, being able to change things. Being able to continue the long evolution, but I have no doubt about that. I am convinced that Humans are and in the end, or close to the end, good. Finding this force to live, and change things."
_______________________
Primates
by Dan Nisand, writer
Ruben Brulat’s approach has something romantic to it, romantic in the nineteenth century sense. His work ist that of a lonely, fanatic and mystic person, who’s thrown himself into a quest that confronts him to the limits and that opens the doors to a new apprehension of the world.
At one time, following Amiel, a whole generation had proclaimed "every landscape is a state of mind", directed its interest to unending perspectives, which were damaged like life itself, tortured like the human feeling. Fascinating, is how this new series of photos, entitled Primates, could be described.
Nevertheless, when a so-called Friedrich represented the human greatness as an anonymous silhouette absorbed in the show of a sea of clouds, Brulat, on the other side, does the complete opposite, by immersing it in reality. For Brulat, it is not anymore a question of evoking the greatness of a character, but that of Creation itself, where the human being, as a species, searches for his place.
Among the hostile rocks, the snow and the ice, barely inclined to welcome life, there is a body without identity, totally naked and deprived. Will he succeed to merge in this set, in this infinity of accidents? Will he know how to be similar to the animal that reigns on its own territory? This desperate attempt to transform this being into a body, for it to be accepted or re-accepted by a matrix completely foreign to the human substance, is very moving. This is when he is nothing but a species, a man from thousands of years ago, forced to know himself and to adapt himself to the outside conditions which are nothing but threats.
Because it is impossible to disregard the conditions of how these pictures were taken, the risk-taking, the intense emotion, the spectacular and the exploration of the limits are tangible. We perceive that the artist answers to all his instincts, that he offers himself entirely and allows himself to be reached by things. If sometimes a pillow of snow seems more welcoming, softer, the spectator cannot repress the shiver that activates in him this defenseless subdued body and devoured by elements. He feels the urgency, the impossiblity to think, but also the speed and the unexpected sensual delight of the action.
Certainly, he doesn’t create the illusion that the fusion with the nature is possible without fight or conditions. But this series recounts a collection, with its set of disappointed hopes and aborted attempts, and at the end of the road, a figace but an indisputable triumph, even if for a split of a second, to be able to create the symbiosis: when the human being, as if calmed, seems to become confused with a rocky mass of fallen rocks, to float serenely on the surface of a black groundwater beside a crust of ice, or to find refuge in the hollow of a carpet of sweet grass, in the dense and deep green.
_______________________
Raise Magazine says :
by Stéphanie Masson
1 / Nu, presque au centre. Couché là sur le côté, on ne voit pas son visage - trop loin petit homme perdu dans l’immensité. Dans l’herbe qui ondule, doucement. Les ondulations de ce vert intense qui glisse sous son corps, et tout autour, petit corps d’homme bercé par ce tapis épais, souple, par ce vaste espace ; cette grande nature impassible, triomphante. Ces rochers gris et coupants, massifs, comme un mur infranchissable, barrière protectrice de cette menue tache d’homme posée là entre deux blocs, avec sa peau nue. Presque blanche.
2 / Mais pas un souffle. Silence absolu, le corps de l’homme sur les rochers cette fois, la neige, l’eau gelée comme un ciel renversé, bleu gris et dur comme un autre versant de la montagne, un autre côté de cette nature hostile, sauvage ; absolument libre d’elle-même, et de ce qu’elle produit. Absolument libre de ce petit corps humain sans force, ni volonté - et dans cette lumière morne, ces nébuleuses blanches autour du corps jeté, cassé de l’homme à peine né, que déjà violenté. Terrible vie qui commence.
3 / Aussi, le petit homme embrasse. Le petit homme cherche la chaleur, son corps abandonné, avide : il veut se fondre à nouveau. Son tout petit corps écarté largement sur les roches sinueuses, organiques - son tout petit corps invisible, oui à peine si on le voit, véritablement, il faut bien regarder ; à peine si l’homme vit encore dans cette grande beauté, ce grand univers, toute l’image remplie, dentelle grise et rude, froide, et puis brune. Et lui.
4 / Mais rien. Non, plus dur encore, plus froid, la vie ne continue pas elle se brise, se recouvre d’un épais manteau neigeux et noirci, aussi, le pauvre petit homme se replie ; se recourbe sur la glace : fœtus tremblant sur cette langue de neige sale, vrillée, et cerclée de masses noires, violentes, là le petit homme plus petit encore, plus fragile, ne sait plus. Ne reconnaît plus ce monde d’où il vient, où il se trouve ; le corps à l’intérieur de lui- même. La grande solitude.
5 / Voilà donc la fin. Ou le retour. Le liquide bleu et froid, sombre, enfin là où le petit homme se plonge, son corps enseveli, flottant. Qui coule, dans cette eau que l’on sent glacée. Pénétrante. Cette ombre sourde de la montagne qui se dessine, et juste après la neige, bordure menaçante - et tout près du corps qui n’en a plus pour très longtemps. Et voilà donc où nous en sommes. Et c’est donc la fin.
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Wallpaper* Magazine says :
by Nancy Aslop.
For Brulat, photography is about capturing humanity expressing convictions– as was evidenced in Immaculate and Primates, his series of images of a business area and the relationship between Human beings and their environment by day and by night, using his naked body to create those powerful scene. Brulat says “I want to understand why people, groups and societies behave the way they do.”
“What shocked me with Immaculate was that this neighborhood lived just for a system, and when at night the system stops, when there is no need to activate it, it simply dies, a system created by Humans, sustained by Humans leave absolutely no love, no happiness, no sadness. No place to any kind of living.
I am fascinated by places where the beauty of Human beings has gone.”
It makes sense then that Brulat focused his attentions on a series of photographs about the Human in the environment, depicting ‘the vulnerability and the smallness of our species.’ Showing a small figure facing the threats of an hostile environment. In ten years time, he hopes to have brought both happiness and sadness to people via his work, but most of all hopes that not all his expectations will come to fruition.
‘Otherwise, in a way, it will be really boring!’
And that’s one adjective we would not associate with Brulat.”
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Immaculate
by Dan Nisand, writer
"Every night, the leaving of all the businessman and employees of the business district “la Défense”, turn it into a no man’s land. Because at night, this international economic center, made of an agglomerate of business towers grown like a steel forest on a gigantic pedestrian flagstone, becomes an outskirts, an urban desert without even a soul to haunt it.
It’s this ghost town that doesn’t seem to wait for anything, that the photographer Ruben Brulat explores, night after night, from footbridge to parking lot, from floors to stairs. Each snapshot has required from the artist dozens of hours of wandering, until he finds a spot whose nothingness strikes a chord in him; a place where the light, the architecture, the materials and the relief create an incongruous and tragic scenery. Afterwards, there’s still hours of observation, impregnation, dreaming. But when the vision appears, it immediately becomes desire, a pressing demand to achieve. To reach this paradoxical symbiosis that he is so gifted to create, the artist has the urge to get naked right here, right now. He has to take possession of the place at all costs; he has to project himself as a human being. Leaving without going all the way is out of the question; it would be fault. The photographer then, founds himself truly naked in his own lens, buried in his own eye.
To fully understand Ruben Brulat, you have to put yourself in the place of this lonely being, who explores every corner of this silent labyrinth, and who suddenly decides, in the middle of the night, to offer himself to the coldness of a place, alone and naked, to make one with the steel, glass and concrete. Just imagine his quest, how he hunt down the right location, imagine the adrenaline running through his veins when he gets undressed and offers his fragile and vulnerable body to the horror of a soul and history-less place.
Ruben Brulat can’t stop himself from exploring every corner of this unique district, he forbids himself to neglect any parcel and it shows in its photography where no detail is left out. Precise to the excess, exploring each centimeter of this too bright or, at the contrary, too quickly damaged spaces. The shadows of the skeletal empty towers are scrutinized to the very depths of them and reveal they gigantic and abandoned reliefs. In the middle of the composition, a naked human body, successively fragile, tortured, in a dream, describes the human life that rises in the most hostile environment.
We are at the heart of the biggest European business Center and there is nothing. The power system lies dormant, waiting for the creatures with flesh and feelings to reactivate it. It seems as if only the Economy, feeding herself with numbers, networks and transactions, manages to survive in this environment. While we, the humans, living on the feelings, sensations, even suffering – all what’s precisely absent from this place – aren’t allowed.
From one photography to the other, a metaphor is made. It becomes clear that where the economical power triumph no life being belongs there. The life that irresistibly and happily insinuate itself everywhere, has been driven away. Even the vegetation, placed there by a program, seems to suffocate in her constraint. Even when she forces herself to take her rights back in the spots the town planning has forgotten, her small victories make the life look like a macabre and obscene phenomenon.
At first sight, the Immaculate series comes under conceptual photography. And yet, the presence of an humble and discreet body, naked without being provocative, sexless, unidentified, makes it a different sort of representation. Strangely, a certain beauty emerges from this ugliness. Is it because of the body ? Because of the strong inspiration of the photographer ? Sometimes, during his nightly wandering, Ruben Brulat encounters a lonely, ghostly, exhausted or grief-stricken soul. Suddenly, a shy and strange “Good evening” rings in the silence. Humanity, after all. Maybe that’s where it comes from, the utter happiness, the feverish euphoria, that takes over the artist, when he takes home one of these eerie/ supernatural snapshot/photography, from the victory of having took a portrait of the humanity out of this place that deprives the life of its essentials rights."
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The omega Man
by Oscar Gomez from Vnfold Poviña
Ruben Brulat's photographs tells us about a time in which man has already become precarious. Images of a Parisian that augur most of his time remotly and lonely.
Each images have the power to evoke ideas without saying a word. A series of photographs that gives movement to the original idea each ones creating a story. It's easy to find some in Ruben's series, small narrative forms that evoke feelings of fragility, smallness, life and death. The artist's naked body, tiny in the great outdoors, irrevocable recounts the loneliness of the last man and the infinite potential of the first.
Still, the presence of this being checked out is kept constantly re-signify and rethink the scenarios to their own place in the world. "Humans are part of nature," says Ruben, "and we need to understand how to behave with her. I needed to represent not a single individual, the human body needed to be like everyone else. So I turned myself in a sort of "bestial mode". With the need to show and express that the man may be in symbiosis, but also in complete dissociation. That he is able to sustain and behave not only with his needs but also with those of all the life that surrounds it and from where ever he emerged. "
These series dealing with these portraits are his last two. On the one hand, Immaculate contrasts the fragility with this bodies on stage naked with a commercial district inhospitable and uninhabited. On the other hand, the series Primates returns Human in nature, with the same dyes and contrasts between immense spiritual and Human deprivation that made Tarkovsky film, Stalker. In this case, the reference is not in vain: "Stalker is one of my favorite movies. The talented Tarkovsky is one of the most brilliant directors, able to plunge your mind into deep emotions, not just superficial. Today, I love the Coen brothers, Gus Van Sant and Soderbergh. Podes you sit with them to watch a movie and you know they're going to take you smartly from one point to another."
Just two years ago Ruben bought his first camera, and an inevitable technical development is seen in their work. However, technically it is not for more than one way to address the ideas. "Photography is just a tool. What i have an intense relationship with is my convictions and the things I need to talk about. For some time I have this energy and two years ago i found ways to channel it in photographs that explained a point of view. The technical growth only shortens the distance between what I have in the head and its limits. "
His method also carries with it the story of his realization. Ruben works alone. He find the locations indicated, prepare the camera, set the timer, take off the clothes and run out into the cold, darkness and water to pose for the pictures. There is some sense of ritual, almost shamanic, throughout the process. Connect with other reality is, somehow, connect with the hidden side of our own world. "I use the fact that i never transformed portraiture in my work. I always use something that exists. So I think photographs are a concept, where ideas, concepts, and point of views, comes from the people. Watching them every day, looking, trying to understand. I love all living things and their behavior. "
Whatever the story behind Ruben and trying to express ideas, his way of talking about them is so strange and fascinating. His language stripped and early paints him as a man posthumous humanity, as a secular priest in a world without the Creator. Invites the mystery, as his own work.