Until September 15th Florent Mattei shows his works in Nice.
In his first personal exhibitions (The World is Perfect, The Parasite), there was already a desire to evoke the world around him while taking a staggered position to see better. There were of course strong and obvious references, to the American photographer Jeff Wall who stimulates him for his stagings of snapshots of life, for his talent to seize the power, the transcendence of a moment. But very quickly, he uses this force to deliver works more ingrained in the news, in the face of the violence of the world. He wants to talk to people because his art is deemed popular.
It is hardly surprising to hear some familiar melodies by listening. Touched in his youth by the arrival of R.A.P. political, “Explicit Lyrics” groups such as Public Ennemy and N.T.M. will rock him to the English singer Kate Tempest today. If there is the “conscious rap”, this rap which tells of society using poetic weapon and sampled old musical pieces, there could very well be a conscious photograph of which Florent Mattei would be one of the heralds . For he too uses poetry and reinterprets historical forms of photography. In the series “Dust”, the choice of the staging, the studio, the decor refers to the great history of photography, that of the late nineteenth century, the decade in which Louis Nadar, Henry Peach Robinson, Hippolyte Bayard invented a new medium. Reacting to these images of war in the Middle East and Middle East that the media resume loop, he seeks to stop them and “isolate in time of the pose of attitudes, those who go through history …”. His images then show civilians (pregnant woman, families, young man …) frozen in postures but covered with dust like out of a bombing.
Contrary to the political and social history that is part of a duration, the news is written day by day, one information chasing the other. This process tends to trivialize or even neutralize the scope, he is challenged by this phenomenon of repetition. “Tinnitus”, the exhibition presented this summer at the Gallery of the Museum of Photography in Nice is therefore an echo where two series are presented opposite.
“It was a kind of Oasis” (2018) takes the form of the traveling photographic studio of the late nineteenth century. The series is located in Corsica. Florent Mattei moves a painted background representing a deserted Mediterranean beach in different landscapes. “It was important to integrate in this work the performing facet of the traveling studio because mountains are for me symbolic of roaming, mountain ranges have often been chosen as a dividing line between two countries. They are a walking ground and the promise of another life, once past to the other side. He explains. The painted landscape of the beach then becomes a mirage, sometimes extending the real landscape around.
The second series shown this summer in Nice recreates scenes of war in the streets and shifts the horrors of bombing into the reality of our daily lives. Directed in black and white, “Here between the debris of things” (2016) was made in Nice a few months before the attack on the Promenade des Anglais. Macabre premonition that is important to clarify. Art, when it is connected to the tune of time, sometimes has a terrible power of divination. In this series, Florent Mattei wanted to put himself in the other’s shoes. Interested in geopolitics and spending a lot of time looking at images of wounded civilians in conflict zones in Palestine and Syria, he thought of “putting these war scenes back on the streets of Nice, a city that did not suffer the same thing. These images then invariably carry a story that goes beyond them.
Thus his last series, “Here under the same sky” evokes great historical events through different symbolic slogans that have crossed the time. From the “No to the police state” in May 68 to the “Am I next?” Of 2016 in the United States through “Futuro”, “We are here to stay”, “La liberta esta cerca”, there is this feeling of revolt against a model of society that “I wanted to stage in front of my camera to celebrate these words that tell the world today,” he says. Here, he moves away from the studio by choosing a device still particular. Ordinary people hold a billboard with slogans and he photographed them with telephoto lens (500mm) 2 or 3km away as the crow flies, and from an elevated position, that of the observer. Then, once the photo is developed, it tightens in the negative on the subject to have a closeup. This brings out a significant grain giving images the timeless dimension of archival photos that popular imagery conveys. This dirty image can not be dated, cut off from temporal or geographical landmarks, apart from the language in which the slogans are written.
Thus, with this desire to give back to the artist his role of agitator and relay of a popular feeling that expresses itself, he creates reaction. His series evoke a world at war, agitated, facing its ghosts and its demons but he cuts out temporal and geographical landmarks, turning his photographs into pure symbols that explode with a raw truth. And it is in this sense that he tells us about the world of tomorrow and seems to tell us that whatever happens, it belongs to us.
Julien Camy
Florent Mattei – Acouphènes
Until September 15th
Galerie du Musée de la photographie Charles Nègre
1, place Pierre Gautier
06000 Nice
