Mazacciology
Opening: October 26, 2021, 7.00 PM.
October 27, 2021 – January 10, 2022
Tuesday to Saturday, from 3.00 PM to 7.00 PM.
Curated by Glenda Cinquegrana and Mazaccio & Drowilal.
Glenda Cinquegrana Art Consulting is glad to present Mazacciology, the first Italian personal show dedicated to the French duo Mazaccio & Drowilal. The duo are quite successful in France where in 2013 they won the BMW Residence Prize at the Festival Les Rencontres d’Arles and have taken part in various other shows in public institutions. Mazaccio & Drowilal, whose real names are Elise Mazac e Robert Drowilal, for their Italian debut have prepared a site-specific exhibition project for the gallery in via Settembrini. On display, you will not find just photos, but actual photo installations, representing the French duo’s quest, which has always been experienced by them through the continuous mixture between photography, collage, and aesthetics in the new digital media.
Thought as an exhibition that has the purpose of encompassing all the two artists’ universe, Mazacciology, develops within the spaces of the gallery in three different sections, connected to three different strands specific to the duo’s research: on the one hand unreleased shots from the cycle “Wild Style”, which, related to the animal theme that floods the Internet and the social media, sees the traditional photographic image constantly rethinking its codes of representation with crossed references from Luigi Ghirri to the trash and pop culture, with a constant game of visual juxtapositions from different sources. In a second room, we are presenting “Nunuche” an installation characterized by its playful and highly corrosive spirit, through which the duo detach themselves from the photographic medium to open up to the installation. Finally, together with the release of their monographic book on this subject, part of the exhibition is dedicated to the series “Paparazzi”, which is about celebrities, where the classical post-photographic query, which makes wide use of images from the Internet and the new media, conveys the sensation of the loss of reality we experience today by being immersed in the bedlam of images where the irreverent game is particularly seductive and freely desecrating.
Born in the 80s, Elise and Robert worked with photography with a free and iconoclastic attitude which implies the new mass photographic culture imposed by the Net and the fundamental step through post-photography as it was founded by Joan Fontcuberta, Clèment Chèroux, Eric Kessels, Martin Parr, and Joachim Schmidt in 2011. “Rather than internet art, it is art from the internet era. In this sense, Mazaccio & Drowilal carry out a change in paradigm encompassing the statute of art and that of the image as it occurs in other areas of everyday life in certain moments of change, such as those described by Walter Benjamin at the beginning of the previous century.”
