Ran Zhang — À propos — Slash Paris

Ran Zhang’s images zoom in on matter, exploring the arcana of the sensory world from different angles and from one series to another. The viewer may experience a kind of confusion faced with these works and the difficulty of grasping their visual overkill — the bizarre, chaotic visions triggered by all the textures and colours that saturate the picture space. In the photographic series Natritine Gaze, for example, the artist resorts to a microscope to penetrate the mesh of the visible, with her focus on synthetic and organic objects producing forms tending towards the abstract and a strikingly painterly effect. Ran Zhang also frequently uses inks and pigments (among other additives) in her printing process, further blurring the works’ legibility. On the other hand, the painted motifs and perforations that fleck the photographs in the more recent Chiral series merge perfectly with the original image, finalising the transmutation of reality as distorted by visual perception. We are not far from alchemy here. Thus, the image, situated between the observing subject and the world, reveals the influences that unite the two, in defiance of objectivity. Scientific pretensions to all-seeingness are challenged by these retouched reproductions whose very fabric, exposed by successive enlargements, marks out the limits of vision — at the same time as it conjures up the atoms that directly engender matter’s intimacy. And so, the most familiar things, once scrutinised a fraction too closely, become totally unrecognisable; and thus, observed the order of the common is sublimated.

— Antoine Camenen, text presentig the artist, L’ahah, 2019.
(translation : John Tittensor)