Glenda Cinquegrana Art Consulting
is glad to announce the
On our Artsy page
“These images have a deceptive character which contradicts the sensationalism they would like to convey” (Mazaccio & Drowilal)
Glenda Cinquegrana Art Consulting is glad to announce an exclusive online show featuring the “Paparazzi” series by Mazaccio & Drowilal, that will take place on Artsy from September 20, 2022, to October 11, 2022. The “Paparazzi” series by the French artists’ duo is one of their most iconic photographic works, which has been already presented in several public institutions and recently collected in a book edited by RVB publ., gathering a work that has been developed since 2012 until today.
The starting point of the series “Paparazzi” was a collection of celebrities’ pictures from their everyday activities such as shopping and jogging, and golfing, but all shot by the paparazzi. After collecting them from magazines and the internet, the duo gathered the images in the same picture allowing them “for the sensational side to be neutralized, so there was a shift from the «scoop» of catching a celebrity, to an anonymous crowd.”(Mazaccio & Drowilal). Working principally with photography and collage, Mazaccio & Drowilal deconstruct multiple facets of contemporary visual culture through their process of gathering and arranging mass-media images. Their visual practice and aesthetic approach are heavily influenced by the Internet’s new iconographies and digital culture. Mazaccio & Drowilal have explored a wide breadth of subjects pertaining to celebrity, branding, artificiality, and identity.
As a material for their photo collages and installations the French artists Elise Mazac and Robert Drowilal, known as the artistic duo Mazaccio & Drowilal, use popular images of contemporary culture that are intentionally torn from their usual context. With the help of diverse techniques, deliberately bright colors, and irony sharp as a razor, the artists transform these images and question the conventional principles of artistic photography. By juxtaposing heterogeneous and often contradictory shots and blurring the boundaries between natural and artificial, Mazaccio & Drowilal provoke the viewer, who is doomed to balance on the verge of disgust and pleasure when confronted by the authors’ extraordinary artistic experiment.
In the “Paparazzi” project, Mazaccio & Drowilal impose silhouette figures of celebrities cut out from the tabloids on idealized natural backgrounds, placing them in stadiums and city streets. All the heroes of the future series were captured by the paparazzi at a time when they were as relaxed as possible, going about their daily business: visiting shops and cafes, buying takeaway food, or engaged in different sporting activities, etc… By adding pictures of stars to a variety of landscapes, the artists neutralize the sensational nature of those images coined by the paparazzi.