Anthony Mirial (Nice, 1989-)

The early years of Anthony Mirial’s work are deeply marked by a raw, nocturnal aesthetic. Self-taught, he began photography in the underground parking lots of the university residences he frequented, where the sole light of a neon became his primary tool. Without studio equipment, he developed an instinctive language, infused with a contemporary neo-Caravaggesque sensibility. The body, initially that of his friends, becomes at once witness, support, and surface of inscription.

Very early on, Mirial diverted the nude and “reclothed” it with stained glass, fragments of classical works, or photographic collages. From these hybridizations emerge images in which aesthetics engage with social and symbolic concerns, women’s rights, freedom, religion, collective memory. This first cycle already lays the foundations of what would become his central axis, the search for traces of the sacred, of aura, of the soul.
Anthony Mirial now develops a practice oriented toward the invisible, what escapes, what remains when the image falters. His work is structured around a central question, how to photograph what has no form.

Passersby, travelers, night wanderers, Mirial extracts fragments of reality in the street, the metro, or throughout his journeys, then transforms them through layers, superimpositions, erasure, or chromatic shifts. He does not merely capture silhouettes, he seeks vibration, presence, persistence, traces of the sacred in the everyday, imprints of aura around bodies, fleeting signals of the soul.

His series unfold this quest, collective memory (Tourists), chromatic alteration (Chromatōn), mythology and transcendence (Mythos), disappearance (Thanatos), invisible zones of the mind. Working through strata, optical, digital, material, Mirial blurs the boundaries between apparition and erasure.

The body becomes sign, icon, contemporary relic, reality itself a malleable material offered to transformation.

Based at Le 109 in Nice, he continues a practice shaped by urban wandering, travel, and introspection. His work has been presented in numerous international fairs and galleries, including London (StART Art Fair – Saatchi Gallery), Miami (Art Wynwood, Art Palm Beach), Bâle (Scope Basel), Paris (Fotofever, Paris Photodoc, Slick Off FIAC, Galerie Mark Hachem)…

Today, Mirial defines himself as a photographer of the invisible, one who seeks less to show than to reveal the sensitive, spiritual, and hidden layers that run through the world and the body.