LIVING IN A PAINTING : The Heat is on

At first glance, the shapes and colors, the magical way Maya Rochat covers the walls, evoke the effects of substances that induce altered states of consciousness. However, what interests the Lausanne-based artist is expanding painting beyond the confines of the canvas. This results in multisensory experimental spaces and a dazzling, vertiginous body of work that simultaneously provides an inexhaustible source for new paintings and performances.

Maya Rochat grew up in an unconventional family. While still of preschool age, her parents took her on a several-month pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, with a horse and caravan. Later, the family settled in a village near Lausanne. Her mother, an interior designer, sparked her interest in painting.

Starting in 2005, Maya Rochat studied photography and visual communication at the École cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL) and in 2012, she earned her master's degree in visual arts at the Haute école d’art et de design (HEAD) in Geneva. During her studies, she already collaborated with musician friends for her first public video performances. In radically associative photographic essays, she examined the image as the product of countless processes of manipulation and treatment.

The site-specific pictorial installations she has been creating since 2015 are initially based on fragments of her own photos or foreign images and photographs that she dissects, distorts, repaints, and layers onto fabrics, plastered walls, and plastic films during performances, usually accompanied by music. She deploys and transforms these into abstract color spaces using overhead projectors. The intensity of these works reflects the artist's ambition to create art not primarily for museums but to touch individuals in their everyday lives. She wants to show beautiful images, she said during her solo exhibition for the 2019 Mobilière Prize, images that open people's hearts, put them in a positive mindset, and lead them to reflect on the state of the world.

A large portion of Maya Rochat's works in the Mobilière collection comes from this exhibition titled Living in a Painting. The formats, often covering entire walls, evoke the immersive nature of the site-specific installation, for which Rochat first covered and wallpapered the floor and walls with paint before positioning her inkjet-printed photos on paper, silver paper, or layered film. Designed as a confrontation with our accelerated era, Maya Rochat's works reflect a threatened, moving world, crossed by infinite flows of image data, plastic particles, and other remnants of an uncontrollable accumulation of human-carried materials.
By giving the image new dimensions of spatiality and temporality, Maya Rochat follows in the lineage of artists like Vivian Suter and Pipilotti Rist, and she stands among the leading young artists of contemporary art in Switzerland.