Michel Mazzoni: Rien, presque
With the Rien, presque (2019/2022) series, without abandoning the experimental character and research on surfaces, my work becomes more ascetic and focuses more on observation and the frame, it combines with the geometric rigor of the abstraction and minimalism. This series is built obsessively during long wanderings in various urban and peri-urban perimeters, in Belgium, France, Romania, Holland, Japan... The resulting images are presented as a collection of found situations, even accidents . You just have to observe, provoke, compose... I work with the spaces as they are, without any staging, not to reveal any essence, but rather to document the particular experience of their ambivalent characters.
Rien, presque refers us to the public space in which I take fragments of images. We can see the inherent aesthetics of what surrounds us, the infra ordinary and the minimalist sculpture. Based on perceptual exercises, the images show interlockings and artefacts. These images somehow represent demarcations in the urban landscape that function like small installations, generated by human actions. I consider them a bit like catalysts of poetic resistance, a state of things at a given moment, time capsules illuminating the current 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.
