Mustapha Azeroual: Recording Structures

19 Mai - 19 Juin 2016

Azeroual’s work is an investigation around various photographic practices as well as the specific challenges raised by the variety of techniques. There is one question that guides his practice: how can we create conditions, using the camera and alternative printing methodologies, where the eye is forced to overrule its learned way of seeing?

 

Azeroual uses the Gum bi-chromate process together with contemporary digital techniques with the intention of constructing images that interrogate the notion that photography is the medium that reproduces exact replicas of what is seen. The ambiguity of this technique, which borrows from the painter’s tool kit, allows for a different type of image. Its development process proves to be a eulogy of slowness in confrontation with "snapshot" of shooting.

 

In Azeroual’s Radiance series he creates a digital artifact from colors captured in the photographic chamber at sunrise and sunset. He transforms the landscape into a horizon. The vibrating surface of the lens reactivates the light cycle in a color chart so subtle that two persons sitting side by side would never view the same color. This act however slight, tricks the human eye into a visual experience that is singular from those of other viewers, but that also may be different with each viewing of the work.