Too much Metal for one hand Paris

Images that strike a chord.

As a growing stream of images invades our gaze through multiple screens, photographic snapshots merge together, absorbed by a background noise in which iconic fragments float. Armed with the aesthetics of excess, Maya Rochat seeks libidinal strategies capable of counteracting the overabundance of representations. The aim is to transcend the limits of a medium that has become too silent. The artist thus draws on the sulphurous sources of a metal culture that provides a means of transcending all limits.

Under the motto Too much metal for one hand, Maya Rochat seeks sensory saturation inspired by the physically disorienting experiences of the mosh pit, the circle pit and the wall of death. Photography becomes performance by reclaiming a vitality sacrificed during the transition to mechanical reproduction. Mötley Crüe and Cannibal Corpse are approached as total works of art, Gesamtkunstwerk, capable of piercing the mists of a hyperconnected augmented reality. But it is above all the great wave of glam metal that feeds Maya Rochat's imagery. A veritable sparkling explosion, emerging in the 1980s from L.A.'s Sunset Strip, it transformed ‘heavy’ excess into a mass product. In Too Much Metal for One Hand, glitter and flamboyant make-up intertwine with the dark hues emerging from the organic porosity of the patterns.

Maya Rochat combines a technophilia specific to the post-Internet generation with an attraction to direct confrontation with materials. The recurring presence of traces of the production process, embodied by the artist's own hand, testifies to the artefactual nature of the image. Digital smudges, spray paint, scanners, film and paint follow one another on the photographic surfaces, which are repeatedly decomposed and re-photographed. These are all strategies aimed at transforming the photograph into a multitude of layered and elusive images. During the processes of manipulation and destruction, the photographs are transferred and recomposed in different formats, including video, installation and publication. Serial repetition is thus transformed into rhizomatic migration.

Maya Rochat's work forms a vast network of intertwined images whose energy disrupts our ordinary codes of interpretation and perception. The result is an immersive visual experience, bordering on abstraction, where images printed on multiple media or projected into space flit around the margins of the photographic medium.

text by Sebastien Peter