A ROCK IS A RIVER Lily Robert

solo show

Maya Rochat's surfaces are simultaneously magmatic and evanescent; flat and riddled with cavities and bumps. Porous. Scrutinizing them, one seems to recognize here and there the legacy of expressionist painting, before thinking better of it: the process put to work is undoubtedly organic and natural, the Devil of reference encouraging us to identify various connections to art history. From the outset, if one wants to see clearly, one needs to get rid of the tenacious habit of wanting images to fit together like the links of a chain. Out with post- modernist conceptual sedimentations where "art becomes the best reading of art".

Maya Rochat's surfaces, where the image becomes soaked in an abrasive and harmful reality, are indeed porous. And at the same time, fiendishly attractive, bustling with iridescent, charred and sprinkled patterns. Yet, this texture is the thing in itself. Essence, the ultimate object of the philosopher's quest, a word which is homonymous in French with essence, as in the gasoline whose fumes escape from exhaust pipes to spread all over the wet tarmac, shimmering and rainbow-colored. Inextricably tied, layers of reality are no longer superimposed; they burn and devour each other as soon as they confront one another. Everything is in everything. And this has been happening for a shorter period of time than it is suggested by the eternal saying. Thus, in Maya Rochat's work, elaboration of form begins with the realization that matter is currently changing in a world also going through changes. Beyond its digitization, the world's very composition is being altered by toxins, polymers, and other hyperobjects. How is it possible then to carry on creating according to ancient models, according to the binary opposition between nature and culture inherited from modernity? Up to which point and up to which volume level is it possible to make a critical load resonate without it flushing out the legibility of form? One thing is certain, it's impossible to be contemporary without taking this new order into account.

The meaning that emanates from Maya Rochat's surfaces would then be that of a psychoanalysis of the matrix. On their surface, fragmented pictures of drifting glaciers, thirty- year-old slides from her parents' collection and digital textures are floating. Mouths, cacti, bleach, bare shoulders and barely dry painted flat tints. Oblivion, tie-and-dye, acid flashbacks and Photoshop layers. Through the emphasis placed on affect and the viewer-reader's interpretation latency, another moment from the history of creation comes to mind. A similar moment of anti-academia, of paradigm change where the creative forces of a coast, the USA’s West Coast, struck a momentary deal: not one movement or one school without a manifesto or group claim. But a spontaneous and disordered reaction to a radical paradigm shift in the course of post-war disorientation, during which a realization of humankind's destructive power and its irreversible impact on the environment occurred. Halfway through the previous century, an unprecedented moment of synchronicity made creative fields echo in unison -poetry, painting, sculpture, cinema-, illegitimate heirs of European situationism.

"Astronauts of the inner space" as they were described by art historian Anne Giffon-Selles7 according to the Situationist International's catchphrase, with these actors engaging in inclusive and under-the-influence syncretism. Their artworks, she explains, are born out of "journeys undergone in concentric circles according to centripetal movement, from a critical exploration of American society, of its American culture and Californian territory to a deep dive into a dilated and visionary space". "The boundaries that need to be transgressed are more and more internal, intimate or spiritual", she explains.

This movement keen on expressive and brutal aesthetics, blending media and potential energies captured along the process nonetheless has a common feature that allows it to be named: assemblage. As seen in Maya Rochat's work, and as an indirect heir of this state of mind, another relationship to assemblage is at play, it overflows from the human sphere, transposing her illustrious predecessors' movement to the new millennium. In her art, the human vestiges that float here and there like free hand painted signs on the wall of a cave no longer dictate the law. They are simply one of the multiple components of this unique and totalizing conglomerate. The assemblage no longer ties together artefacts made by man, but only replicates on the artwork's scale the post-industrial era's violent and abrasive chemical techniques. Except that this scale, that of the artwork, of the book, of the printed page, is the only one where one might hope to become aware of a phenomenon with a much more global magnitude. By freely assembling forms in order to extract their use value, Maya Rochat turns her artworks into haunted and preoccupying sites, breaking in the same gesture with the tradition of resemblance. This is not art about the anthropocene or any other label that may be used in an attempt to distance, like an object to be studied, a reality that seeps in through all of our pores. Everything has already coalesced and is attractive as much as it is repulsive, with beauty revealing that it can take on the deleterious face of an ecstatic dance on the brink of an impending catastrophe.

— Ingrid Luquet-Gad, critique d’art.
Texte extrait du livre A rock is a river, 2017, Self publish, be happy