Patrick Tosani — Assemblages — CPIF — Centre photographique d’Ile-de-France — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: April 2 → July 10, 2011

For this occasion the singular spaces of the CPIF will enable Patrick Tosani to deploy and articulate three recent series which will be shown here for the first time. Some of the works, of very large format, were created specifically for the proportions of this vast site.

The exhibition, conceived as an arena for experimentation, modifies the space using amplified images and incites movement. The artist invites viewers to replay the experience of the works in certain images where the body is confronted by architectural modeling, except that here relations of scale are inversed, with the viewers surrounded by monumentalized objects and bodies.

In line with the artist’s previous works, the photographs presented at the CPIF are the results of experiments: objects are subjected to various actions, architectural models are juxtaposed with parts of the human body which appear outsized — Architecture et corps, 2006 ; they are illuminated, disturbed, hollowed out by slide projections of urban views — Architecture et photographie, 2006-2007 ; or covered by fresh paint applied using various procedures (dripping, brushwork, etc) — Architecture et peinture, 2009-2010.

All these elements interact and confront each other until something occurs: a visual and spatial event which is recorded by photography, questioning the appearance of things and our perception of the world. If the object remains recognizable, its function becomes uncertain. Overwhelmed by shifting material, the archetype, the “substrate of reality” embodied by the model, becomes precarious, an evolving form, organic matter. A more concrete and precise reality is reintroduced, a certain corporeality emerges to disturb the ideal order of the architecture: a metamorphosis.

The disturbance affecting perception and recognition is less linked to the object/subject of the photograph than it is to the nature of the medium itself. The title Assemblages refers as much to what occurs within the image — the layout of the complex relations between photography, painting and sculpture, surface and volume, image and space — as it does to the articulation of the three series within the space of the site, to the retranscription of a presence, a journey, a relationship with the world.