Born in France, the artistic duo Manon Duparc (*1991) & François Pain (*1988), collided with each other at the very beginning of their creative journeys. They both studied in Geneva from 2009 to 2015 - interior architecture and design for her, architecture for him. Providential encounter, they immediately recognized each other and started dreaming of a professional and artistic collaboration, one that has been focusing exclusively on photographic images since its inception.
In 2017, they established «Think utopia», an architectural photography atelier whose distinctive style and approach, navigating between geometric details and enigmatic atmospheres, quickly earned them commissions for prestigious museums such as the «Bourse de Commerce - Pinault collection» designed by Tadao Ando, the «Carmignac Foundation» museum and the «Albert Kahn photography museum» designed by Kengo Kuma.
In 2020, wishing to highlight their personal creations, Manon Duparc & François Pain gave birth to their shared creative voice under the name «Onoko». They immediately began to appear in Off Spaces and Project Rooms for group and solo exhibitions, in and around Geneva and at the Venice Biennale 2021.
Onoko is meant as a plea for the imaginary through each of its creations. For their main photographic series, «Percept», Manon and François wish to capture the atmospheres that pervade their soul, seek to embody the ether that one can only momentarily perceive beyond the manifest. And in the process, they annihilate anything figurative that would render the images trivial. In their eyes, we witness the shapeless soul of the void which is in essence light, color and sound. The subsequently unedited images, which thus consist solely of complex color degradations, nevertheless exhibit a great sensitivity to the details of «light and form» or «forms of light», as well as to the atmosphere and its composition. This is a new approach to observing the poetry of reality.
Fascinated by the subtleties of paper and its various languages, Onoko set off to research and practice paper production in Japan. After much experimentation, two very distinct types of paper were selected to convey their different atmospheric resonances.
The most dynamic colours are laid down on a cotton fibre paper, giving an abysmal effect to the dark colours, like a black hole catching the eye, while the lighter colours burst out of the frame.
As for the softer colours, they are laid down on handmade Japanese paper with «fibres of light» (as Onoko call them), which make the colours dance, adding depth and bringing out the light in the blacks.
Each Percept is produced in four formats, each being a unique edition preserving the fugacity of these colorimetric symphonies. Ones that are played out infinitely around the world but always in a unique way.
« The percept is a set of perceptions and sensations that survive those who experience them »
Gilles Deleuze (French philosopher)