Focused on the questions of image-making and image display, Craft is an artist's book by made up of a substantial body of images that, directly or indirectly, engage with the notion of fabrication—manufactured objects, compositional experiments, architectural forms and more.
Blending photographs, exhibition views and archival material, this book has the particularity of having been conceived in close collaboration between the publisher, the artist and the author, giving new meaning to the reading and apprehension of the images, through the implementation of echo phenomena, correspondences, extensions, even mise en abyme, between the visuals and the accompanying textual data. For Michel Mazzoni, this latest work arose from a desire to share his practice differently—by revealing how his thinking and creative process evolve across the pages, as they naturally do throughout the books and exhibitions he creates.
Michel Mazzoni (born 1966) is a French artist based in Brussels, using photography and video installation. He develops a "plastic" photography that goes back to the sources of the photographic act.
"Situated as it is at the very turn of the century, and questioning from the outset the inflation and desubstantialisation involved in the hegemony of images, Michel Mazzoni's photographic practice is an image factory or rather an image-thinking factory. An image which outflanks it and decompartmentalises it in multifarious ways, from its installation in situ to its editorial deployment. Either digital or analogue, mostly close-up, they are subjected to manipulations at the source (luminous, chemical or optical manipulation of the negative) or through post-processing (scans, printing, screens, inversions), in order to degrade them, to shield them from overly indicial information, and provide them with a renewed quality as an attention catcher.
The editorial space is conceived and practised by Mazzoni as a genuine exhibition space whose display and reading he nevertheless replays. The intrinsic qualities of the editorial object, variations of paper, of grammage and of printing within a unity of format and of graphic design, contribute as much as the in situ installation to creating with a rare aptness the conditions for the appearance of an elliptic narrativisation." — Christine Jamart
