Charlie Masson
Comunicato stampa
A keen beholder of his surroundings, Masson draws on everyday life and seemingly mundane objects to transcend their apparent banality. In doing so, he highlights the underlying, metaphysical meanings that the artifacts shaping tangible reality can hold. Subtly imbuing the ordinary world with poetic significance, he invites the audience to reconsider what may have long been overlooked or rendered indifferent. As put by Flaubert “Anything becomes interesting if you look at it long enough,” in truth Charlie Masson’s practice seems embedded in discoveries, spontaneous observation and impulsive contemplation setting the foundations of what is perhaps a perpetual quest for mystery behind normalcy.
While the title of the exhibition inevitably recalls the eponymous television MTV program, it is not a nostalgic reference to the artist's childhood, but rather an allusion to the act of “stripping something back to its essentials”. In a way, these paintings operate as an acoustic rendition of the present technological landscape: everyday digital interfaces cleaned out of their functionality and displayed for contemplation, revealing their exposed qualities. This series of oil paintings representing light switches, electrical outlets and plugs found in the most contrasting locations are thus brought together under a singular denominator. In this sense the exhibition space becomes a harbor of eclectic stories breaking their apparent geographical, historical and architectural differences to form a coherent corpus of items not only interrelated by virtue of function and design, but by spatial semiotics. Mixing the domestic with the public, the delicate with the bold, the electrical with the mechanical, the rational with the metaphysical, this collection of oil paintings on boards becomes an interpretative lens that brings to light (pun intended) the extraordinary dimensions of what might otherwise appear to be prosaic elements, defined solely by their primary use, and often disregarded. Small windows into people's quotidianity, these works not only showcase devices that are casually and absentmindedly touched hundreds of times every day, but also reveal markers of memory, experience and time, that in fact light up a person's room, kitchen, bathroom, office... and ultimately life. Recalling, in some ways, the great traditions of Realism and Naturalism, Masson’s paintings do more than simply depict what is seen and experienced each day, they narrate quotidian life in a way that resonates with the sociologist’s effort to “evoke the ordinary in a fashion that let people see how extraordinary it is,” as suggested by Pierre Bourdieu. In a way these small paintings are pictorial testimonies of the ordinary metamorphosing into the extraordinary.
According to John Berger “Today, to try to paint the existent is an act of resistance instigating hope”. If Unplugged is the result of the artist's sociological approach to the obvious and the ambiguous, the visible and the inconspicuous, it also reflects Charlie Masson’s phenomenological embrace of tangible reality. “In an age where increasingly large portions of our lives are mediated through invisible technologies, these physical interfaces retain a tangible presence.”In this sense, the audience is led to look with new eyes and comprehend with intention the mystical nature of “things”.
