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.
"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
