Michel Blazy — Art : Concept Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 20 → July 22, 2017

As continuation of a collaboration that has been developing for more than twenty years, Art:Concept gallery is pleased to present the tenth personal exhibition of Michel Blazy.

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Michel Blazy works, experiments and collaborates with living matter. From his debut at the Villa Arson until his recent installations at the Venice Biennale, he has not ceased to reaffirm it. However, and in the image of the present exhibition, the living is not always invited in its most awaited form.

Michel Blazy, Michel Blazy — Solo Show, from May 20th, 2017 to July 22nd, 2017

Here no green plants, no insects. The living — at least in its common acceptance — is not ostentatious, but almost invisible. Instead, one discovers almost academic productions mainly consisting of seemingly inert materials, issued from the industrial circuit (plaster, food colorings, plastic).

A collection of paintings presented in a classical manner on the wall, two frescoes in bas-relief which, like their Italian counterparts, have been colored “in fresco” (on fresh plaster) or a tondo whose motifs evoke the ribs of a marble sculpture or of its trompe l’oeil imitation.

Michel Blazy, Michel Blazy — Solo Show, from May 20th, 2017 to July 22nd, 2017

All the stakes lie here; Imitate the living. Not to capture faithfully its beauty and its traits, but to reproduce and replay its strategies of emancipation, expansion and evolution. In the space-time of the exhibition, the artists stages the living without necessarily calling upon it. He uses all types of matter, organic or otherwise, without establishing hierarchies or a boundaries, and demonstrates with humor and poetry that industrial material, too, is part of a dynamic life cycle made up of hazards and metamorphoses. Thus, plaster and dyes team up to create gardens or microcosms whose only artificiality resides in their color. In the same way as “real” plants, bacteria, cells or any other organism that their forms evoke, they are the result of a chain of reactions and interactions.

Michel Blazy, Michel Blazy — Solo Show, from May 20th, 2017 to July 22nd, 2017

Inspired by microscopic observation techniques, Michel Blazy becomes a biologist who, with his pipette filled with dyes, makes these phenomena visible to the public.

But not subjected to the imperative of scientific objectivity, his approach liberates and renews our conception of the living and the inert, favoring the power of experience and emotions on the production of a politico-ecological discourse. In a certain way it prolongs and surpasses contemporary reflections on the object, in an attitude constantly rejecting all immobilism. Never fixed, neither in time nor in space, it affirms its emancipation and its permeability.

Julia Mossé (translation Frieda Schumann)