Sets / Installations
Sets
De natura rerum
Stereophotography is a method for creating the illusion of relief by superimposing two photographs taken of the same object or place, but from slightly different viewpoints, recreating the distance between the two eyes. Cyril Hatt needs hundreds of viewpoints to recreate relief without resorting to optical illusion.
A closer look reveals that the illusion fails: mopeds, cars, household appliances, pairs of shoes, and all the objects that might be tempted by Cyril Hatt’s photographic ambiguities are not reconstructions but ghosts. Hollow, empty, hastily collaged with whatever means are at hand, they are, in more ways than one, illusions. Illusion of the image, illusion of relief, the illusory temptation to possess the body and soul of the image.
With basic technical means (a digital camera, a basic printer, everyday paper) and unfailing patience, Cyril Hatt reconstructs, often with vagueness caused by the adjustment of the images, whatever falls before his lens. Everyday objects, modern temptation, necessary tools—everything is included. To say that every object (even consumer) is an illusion? He would then join the symbolic order of the still life of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A silent world, a life in waiting.
Observation and patience thus allow him to reconstruct humble forms where use and wear meet. Here, mopeds, cars, electrical appliances and household tools, pairs of shoes, or cameras are no longer caught up in fashion or temptation. By depriving them of their seduction, by reassembling them like puzzles, by weakening everything that gave them market value, Cyril Hatt smuggles them into the realm of art.
François Bazzoli
Installations
A fan of scissors and photography, Cyril Hatt seems to take a certain pleasure in playing with our perception of volume. Since 1999, he has been pursuing a body of work in which photography, viewed as a material, undergoes a series of repurposings. Thus, his images are fragmented, shattered, or reconstructed, scraped, scratched, torn, and “re-stapled.”
Beginning in 2003, photographic volumes have appeared in his production. The photographed objects, often inspired by street art, are reproduced at their full scale in 3D, after undergoing a series of alterations and montages. They thus tend to recompose “image landscapes” stripped of their original function, while remaining images taken from our daily lives. Paradoxically improvised and sophisticated, the result is particularly disturbing. These objects ultimately have only their fragility to offer us, thus making them sensitive and detaching them from the playful or the anecdote.
Nicolas Rosette
