Michel Blazy. Living Room
For over twenty-five years, Blazy has been working with organic matter, integrating it with everyday objects. The artist creates aesthetic processes in the temporal dimension, with results that are always open to interpretation. The material contained in his works brings with it the potential of growth and deterioration at which all of the artist’s works aims. His works result in perennial alteration, driven by the varying of the contexts and the unfolding of their very lives in a hymn to metamorphosis and the incessant process of renewal of the cycle of the living.
For the MAN Museum, Blazy has planned a space to be lived in, an “animated” living room in which organic elements – grass, plants, foodstuffs – live together with apparently static objects, such as clothing or old computers. The installation subverts museum conventions by proposing an alternative model of exhibition, in which fortuitousness and self-generating systems come together to escape from the control of their very creator. From a space for exhibitions, the museum becomes a stage, a vital space within which interweave occurrences that are not always perceptible (germination, growth, decomposition). The biological matter becomes an active partner in the construction of the work so as to underscore the role and influence of external factors such as light, humidity and temperature.
Living room provides a physical space as an organism, opening the way to a reflection on the relationship between nature and culture and promoting an articulated vision of reality not centred on human experience. It is a complex system in which are at work multiple entities – be they forms of vegetable life or machinery – that exist outside of us, but which move and evolve together with us. In this sense, Blazy’s latest works – in which we find electronic devices, computers and vegetable elements – appear to add an autonomous voice to the present debate on technological animism and the life of objects, and reaffirm the centrality of natural forms and processes.
