Laurence Miller Gallery is pleased to present HYPER, an exhibition of 15 color photographs by the forty-eight year old French photographer Denis Darzacq. HYPER refers to the new garish supermarkets in Paris and Rouen where consumer goods, brightly packaged and presented, make for a vivid and contemporary backdrop for his pictures. Darzacq brings street dancers, mostly young men and women in their late teens and early twenties into these stores and asks them to perform their leaps, jumps, twirls, and other gravity-defying movements. Darzacq's working methods are wonderfully captured in a documentary film by Marie-Clotilde Chery. The photographs explore the tension between being and having, between the human body and the built environment. They offer a fresh, witty and intensely colorful commentary on global consumerism and freedom of spirit.

HYPER No.3 shows a man floating as if he were a frozen food within a large refrigerated display. HYPER No.15, taken at floor level, shows a man hovering two feet off the floor, like an angel escaping from a Baroque painting. And HYPER No.7 captures a woman seemingly thrust out of a flower shop. Is this today’s Garden of Eden? Denis Darzacq’s photographs, taken in fractions of a second and not photoshopped, sit comfortably at the edge of traditional stop-action photography.

Denis Darzacq has exhibited extensively in Europe and Australia over the past ten years. He has worked on music videos and feature films since 1985, collaborated with Agnes B on fashion catalogs, and has three monographs published.