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16/3/2012

Michel Blazy

Galerie Art:Concept, Paris

They’re not interested in believing, their concern is a will to believe.
Their goal is to be on the road, even if the road doesn’t lead anywhere.
They don’t know about threat and will never have anything to lose.
Alive and pretty, they simply are:
Lasagnas
Michel Blazy – 1992

Michel Blazy has created a universe made of perishable, live and mutating matter. His use of organic and live materials of humble extraction that can be found in any kitchen or garden gives birth to a lively, animated, shifting and strange kind of art. His installations are encounters of materials that aim at stretching a moment’s duration through different strategies of survival. The first strategy used by living matter for its own safeguard is breeding, and Michel Blazy’s works apply the same method to ensure their own survival; they breed and reoccur; beckoning the artist to find the right gesture and fulfill all necessary material conditions to succeed. Hence, his produced artifacts will fit into a cycle of living-matter and create a sort of anti-time ritual much akin to a natural-life strategy.

For his new solo exhibition at Art:Concept, Michel Blazy has taken over the gallery and produced a sensory area designed to provoke a unique moment. This will lead the visitor to make his way across a tactile, visual and olfactory path among pieces that no longer hang from tidy picture-rails but occupy the entire space with their oddity. Far from shunting art into the role of descriptive phenomenon in charge of embellishing things and exclusive to just an illusionist record, Michel Blazy promotes it to the level of a new form of intuitive knowledge capable of short-circuiting our perception of space. The floor undulates under the meanderings of a long tin-foil snake, walls melt and mutate on the whim of biological processes as pizzas turn into paintings and lasagnas into sculptures, while a beer-bottle is in charge of doing the foam-fountain act every evening at 6 p.m. By this jumble of foods, the artist invites us to observe, touch, and feel things and to imbue ourselves with all the uniqueness of the present instant. We are not supposed to look at objects in a perspective of possession, but to appreciate them according to the uniqueness of an instant; experiencing the only way in which emotions are produced.

Like many contemporary artists, Michel Blazy is heir to various artistic legacies ranging from Arte Povera to post minimalism and Duchamp’s readymade, the whole sprinkled with Neo-Realism as well as with a touch of Color-Field Painting. However, he does not claim to be the follower of any of these movements and has developed, over the past twenty years, a very personal and surprising form of artistic practice. The transformative character of his proposals, even when realized, prevents his productions to ever turn into definite forms and allows them to remain suspended between the moment of creation and the path that they will follow in their empirical development. Michel Blazy’s hybrid works are more than just experimental food gardens left at the mercy of time; quotes from art history and cultural references are numerous, and allow the artist to interrogate and question our times through considerations on unpredictability and an inevitable certainty tainted by consumerism in which our society is sadly immersed. Therefore, the multiplicity of possibilities offered to spectators engages us to look closer at these metamorphoses, which remind us of the mutations that occur under our very eyes in realm of what we consider our ordinariness. Nature, like any eco-system, be it human, animal or vegetal, is defined by the symbiosis of different apparently contradictive domains: minerality for example complements the dynamism of life, forming a complex whole that could never be reduced to its mere positivist aspects. In this exhibition, Michel Blazy sets up a choreography of junk-food culture, creating a vanitas-painting in which skulls and candles are replaced by industrialized, common and perishable products that surround us in our everyday-life and tell us about pleasurable moments of regression that mean nothing special but still inscribe themselves in our time.

Michel Blazy’s critique is by no means bitter or stern, it comes from a desire to question works of art as such, because according to him artworks are not to be reduced to their material side but must be defined according to the place they occupy in the world of culture. It is all about deciphering all the symbols that we receive both from nature and from our environment to try and gain access to a higher plane. To be able to do this, the full acceptance of a mobilization of our senses is required. By means of an artistic language that often sings the praises of “letting loose” in a sort of “effortless doing”, the artist implements a perceptible system in which our senses become a link between the observer and the observed. This allows different possibilities to be interwoven as many sensorial and experimental possibilities that help us better understand the architecture of our own thought while searching for new paths, meanings or interpretations behind the pervading reality of the world.

Aurélia Bourquard
Traduction Frieda Schumann

vernissage le samedi 17 mars

Galerie Art:Concept
13 rue des Arquebusiers - Paris
Tuesday - Saturday 11am - 7pm

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