A body of fragmented images and views that draw their iconography from public spaces or from motifs specific to modernity.
These images somehow represent demarcations in the urban landscape that function like minimalist sculptures generated by human actions. Mazzoni considers them as traces of daydreaming, catalysts of poetic resistance, little time capsules illuminating the world. Like the philosophical thought of Vilém Flusser, this book is about "the state of things", the relationship between things being more significant than the things themselves. We discover in these images the aestheticism inherent in what is close to us, in the banal, in everyday life. While flipping through the book, relationships become visible between the initially disparate images. The recurring shapes are invisible connecting lines that condense into an abstract narrative.
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.
"Photography, with Michel Mazzoni, is a procedural activity that requires movement and circulation of the body as well as the gaze. An assiduous scrutinizer of his environment, the artist generally dwells on insignificant, precarious or neglected elements in order to make visible the many interstices that punctuate the course of existence and to which we do not necessarily pay attention. Engaging as much with spaces, solids, voids, asperities and off-screens as with the reminiscences they generate, the artist's fragmented images unfold according to the places that host them, like punctuations, to try to formalize a moment suspended in the frenetic pace of our daily lives.
Engaged in a minimalist and artisanal approach entirely dedicated to the exploration of the visual field, the artist works in series, alternating large, medium and small formats, resorting to manipulation, duplication and superimposition to give birth to deliberately enigmatic composite images. Thus, photocopies, colored gelatins and silver prints are regularly associated, within a creation itself or as an extension of several, augmented from time to time by sculptural assemblages designed from recovered objects or produced for the public, like print media placed on the floor.
Resolutely against the tide of classical photography, Michel Mazzoni's plastic practice is disconcerting by its ability to consider reality as an inexhaustible visual material that would contain an infinite number of modulations, variations and iterations, provided one takes the time to dwell on it. 'Qualityless images of places, objects, they 'catch', according to the artist's own words, without us knowing exactly why and produce a gap, a distance and a sudden irruption of a reality that resists to any symbolic reading' (Éric Suchère). Thus, like a composer who would have based his entire musical composition on the principle of the ostinato, the artist proceeds by contrast, dialogue and counterpoint to produce, with each new presentation, a development adapted to his environment—whether through the pages of a book or in the exhibition space—and where the intervals of breathing always occupy a dominating place."
Clémentine Davin
