VikMuniz

Vidigal, 2018.

Vik Muniz: Handmade

Xippas Gallery, Paris
September 8th – October 20th, 2018
Opening: September 8th, 2018, from 3 pm

Xippas Gallery is pleased to present Handmade, Vik Muniz’s new solo exhibition. In this new series, Vik Muniz explores the nature of perception, playing on the dichotomy between the object and its representation, and reinventing the possibilities of the construction of the photographic image.

The “handmade” works, as the title of the exhibition suggests, are the result of a hybrid process combining manual, or artisanal treatment – namely painting or collage – and high-resolution digital photography. The results are complex compositions, each unique pieces, combining different techniques: paper and cardboard are painted, cut out and superimposed on a surface, before being photographed in order to allow for manipulation, rearranging and further photographing, and so on.

By creating different planes which reveal underlying elements and their photographs, Vik Muniz invents real trompe-l’œil where the objects and their photographic representations are interlinked in a visual game.

The works in this series, akin to geometric abstraction or Cubist paintings, play on volume and movement, transcending the two dimensions of the photographic image both symbolically and literally, in order to reconnect with its materiality. The artist, therefore, experiments with photographic media and uses the technique of printing on aluminum to create compositions in three dimensions, where the layers of paint, shapes cut out in the metal, and the shadows duplicate each other and overlap, merging with their images. Like bas-reliefs, these volume works contain a simulation, hovering between “truth” and illusion, between reality and its double.

The increasingly porous border between the object and its copy reveals the mechanism behind our ways of seeing and understanding the image. In the digital age, where images increasingly take the place of objects and their manipulation becomes an integral part of daily life, reproducibility becomes one of the legitimate principles of creation. As the artist says, “there is now hardly any difference between a piece of work and its image”. In his new series, he develops a reflection on the fleeting concept of material reality and its possible interpretations. The aim of the illusion created by Vik Muniz is therefore not simply to destabilize our perception, but to “reveal the architecture of our concept of truth”.

Galerie Xippas Paris
108 Rue Vieille du Temple,
75003 Paris,
France