Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques — À propos — Slash Paris

In the current multiplicity of photographs currently available for any type of manipulation and media, Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques is interested in dark or over-exposed images, blurred or creased images that are almost impossible to decipher. What makes an image, he wonders ? In turn, he uses the photographic medium, not to record reality but to repeat the stereotypes that comprise it. Games of memory and forgetfulness. How does iconography take precedence over form what Georges Didi-Huberman develops under the title of “survival” ? Under what conditions does a form appear or reappear ?

Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques invites us to think of a moving memory, constantly remodelling itself and questions the methods of writing history.

Moreover, we reach this same paradox for the artist. His own images will always be overdetermined, exuberant. Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques responds to this with fiction. His intention is in fact less to report than to exploit the potentialities of the fantasized image, always destined to succumb to the point of view. It is this impossibility itself which becomes the starting point for the artist’s work.

Sylvain Couzinet-Jacques thus emphasises the fictional potentialities of images which surround us, their rough condition, the impossibility of telling, but their abstract capacity to survive, to dream, beyond all commentary. There could therefore be something sincere in not seeing very well there, in expressing absence.

Graduated from the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux Arts de Marseille then from Ecole Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie d’Arles, his work has been exhibited internationally, in 2013 at LE BAL in Paris, Noorderlicht Photo Festival in Groningen, Paris Photo, at the Galerie du jour agnès b., Salon de Montrouge, Kyotographie in Kyoto and at the Rencontres d’Arles in 2012.

His photographs have been noticed at the Leica Oskar Barnack Award & the Sciences Po for Contemporay Art Award in 2014.