Vanessa Bertin is a photographer. She lives and works in Paris.

In the series entitled LIGHTS OUT!, Vanessa Bertin presents eleven black-and-white photographs in which the emergence of light constitutes the central subject: at times softly diffused, like a sun gradually flooding every particle of matter that responds to it; at others, incisive, akin to a Fontana-like incision or to the irruption of white within the black in Marfaing’s work.

Vanessa Bertin’s work in cinema is undoubtedly not unrelated to this mise en abyme at the heart of photography itself, nor to her affinity for industrial light and the starkness of technical spaces.

The deliberately heightened contrasts recall the approach of Ray K. Metzker, where deep blacks are cut by an architectonic light, charging the image with such tension that it holds us in suspension. We sense the intensity of a light that could burn everything in its path, were it not held in place by the sheer weight of black.

This salutary polarization of light and darkness inevitably brings to mind the radical break introduced by the young and provocative Friedrich Nietzsche with the publication of his first work, The Birth of Tragedy, in which he disrupts centuries of thought dominated by the Apollonian figure by unearthing the repressed impulse of Dionysus. By invoking the god of wine and inebriation, of chaos, darkness, and suffering, Nietzsche rebalances our impulse toward clarity, harmony, and ideal form—embodied by Apollo and his lyre—while demonstrating that our desire to exist is all the stronger for it. In the exclamation Lights out!, one can hear an affirmative “Yes” to life, echoing the philosopher’s later thought, in which this affirmation signifies the capacity to embrace the totality of existence, in both its most tragic and most luminous dimensions. The emergence of light captured by Vanessa Bertin thus becomes an invitation, in a Nietzschean sense, to turn our gaze away from that which ordinarily leads us not to see, and in doing so, to look into the depths of our own existence.  The novelty of this thought, breaking with nihilistic pessimism and Schopenhauerian resignation, finds a contemporary resonance in Bertin’s neon lights—neon deriving from the Greek néos, meaning new.

This conceptual framework is supported by the remarkable precision with which Vanessa Bertin composes her images—initially figurative, then necessarily abstract—and by her nuanced handling of black and white contrasts. The search for the right paper—capable of absorbing this deep, dense, velvety Dionysian black while allowing the luminous intensity of neon white, at once soft and clinical, to emerge—became a compelling material investigation. Here, the work of master papermakers deserves particular recognition. It was William Turner paper by the German manufacturer Hahnemühle, with its exceptional qualities, that prevailed in the tests conducted alongside—and with the guidance of—the outstanding printers at Initial Labo in Boulogne-Billancourt. William Turner is a cotton paper with a strongly textured surface, notable for preserving the depth of blacks, yet demanding meticulous surface preparation prior to printing and particular care in mounting. With great delicacy, the teams at Initial Labo first gently brushed the surface of the paper to achieve full coverage of the blacks, then handled it with precision to mount it onto Dibond panels set within black aluminium floating frames. The photographs are intentionally presented without glass, allowing the William Turner paper to fully reveal their painterly quality.