Other Things Visible
Michel Mazzoni

2019
30 × 20 cm
Published by
MER.
Price
200.00 euros

Limited edition 
20 copies numbered & signed by the artist. 

Inkjet print 20 × 30 cm on Innova Fibaprint mat 280 grs. 
+ book 'Other Things Visible' 

Reserve by sending an e-mail to pauline.scharmann(at)
merbooks.be and wiring 200 euro to account BE84 3101 9210 5859 (BIC BBRUBEBB), mention ‘Edition Mazzoni’. 

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Michel Mazzoni (°1966) is a visual artist who uses the photographic medium and explores its essence. A search and reflection on the limits of the image, a fragmentary aesthetic that blurs the figurative referent and reveals the materiality of the images, place his work on the frontier of figuration and abstraction. 

Considering that photography is not a medium intended to account for reality or to offer a faithful representation, it moves away from this concrete view to produce “objects” that blur our established vision. The work is based on the image as a motive, but it tends to disappear. The accident is the result of a technical work and a semantic reflection. Michel Mazzoni proceeds by subtraction and with this distancing, the images become more intriguing, the spectator wonders about their meaning, their content and their relations. 

At the moment of the creation of the images, there is no defined mode of operation, it starts from simple things, from fortuitous encounters. A way to grasp the banality to transform it into a poetic and conceptual universe. To divert the images of their uses to scramble the reading. I would say that my approach is timeless and timeless: the places I photograph are not really defined and could be in undetermined times. These are usually fragmentary views, images “without qualities”, everyday with tiny clues. These places are there, very real, but the way I treat them causes this abstract and complex distance. What I am trying to show are the forces that flow in it and the thoughts that it gives rise to the one who looks. Point spaces, places, objects where it “hangs”, a strong visual presence but which explains nothing. The images that attract attention are those that require viewers to stop, look and reflect, to ask questions about what they perceive and the process of creating the work. 

On the formal level, it is an attempt at exhaustion and impoverishment of the medium by alternative and experimental methods, namely manipulations of light, chemical, optical (at the source, on the negative) , or directly on the image in post-processing (scans and multiple prints, frames, inversions, curves ...). 

–– Michel Mazzoni 

In his installations, his scenographies, the choice and the sequence of the images is made according to his own criteria, not communicated to the spectator so that he can create himself a path, reconciliations, distances, even a narration. Its “in situ” devices develop sensory shortcuts, tensions that affect the gaze, reflexive experiences whose meanings remain unresolved. 

Among the means of dissemination, he also likes publishing books whose report background / form is meticulously thought out. The space of the works is articulated on the same principle, with images that resonate or counterpoint in a rhythmic concern that takes into account the exhibition space. The confrontation, the reconciliation, the scale, the spacing, the technique of drawing and the mode of presentation are an integral part of the overall perception of the work.