Everything Goes Dark a Little Further Down

“ The images in Everything goes dark a little further down are weird and playfully, deliberately perverse. An array of body parts are seen in fragments throughout – torsos appear without arms, feet crush heads, bodies contort, faces melt, brains explode. In one self-portrait, the artist has manipulated the photograph to make his head appear severed but alive, his eyes still alert and staring into the lens. In another, he holds a mannequin, kissing it, and in it that act creates his own, disturbed version of a mirror image – one side flesh and blood, the other just soulless plastic. Elsewhere, Croizier draws a grid across his body in thick, black marker, echoing pictures from the medical and pseudo-scientific archives he spent time devouring for research. “The body is primordial in this work,” he says. “Our own body is the most ordinary thing to each of us, and yet the most secret. Bodies are beautiful, unique and political. In reference to anatomical iconography, I try to deconstruct normative representations of the body, with a view of asking questions such as ‘to what extent is a body a body?’ and ‘how can it free itself from the norms that constrain it?’” “To me,” he muses, “this work is a celebration of the renunciation of being normal.” It’s a project for anyone who's ever had the guts to truly, monstrously, fabulously, be themselves. Extract from a text written by Joanna L. Cressell, published in Lens Culture, August 2021

“‘A love letter to the abnormal, a farewell to the norm’, Matthieu Croizier’s work sets bodies free from the way they are supposed to look like. He tilts and twists paradigms to shape a world where the horizon’s line isn’t straight, and flesh is not condemned to order. The words ‘beauty’ and ‘ugliness’ cease to mean much, monstrosity is reclaimed as tender and spectacular, queerness is a magical and constant act of mutation. If the images that we are used to seeing define the things we’re able to imagine, That Moment Where You Can See The Crack In The World suddenly expands the coordinates of what we feel is possible. Reality has opened up, free and in flux.” Text by PhMuseum’s visual editor Camilla Marrese In my work, I generally seek to evoke the tension between opposing notions, such as beauty and ugliness, fascination and repulsion, the ordinary and the spectacular... "That moment when you can see the crack in the world" is an ongoing personal project on which I have been working for a year. Using the body as a raw material - my own or that of people close to me - I try to create the spectacular from the simple things around me. The photographs depict an extraordinary act of metamorphosis, where fragments are melded together to create something new. Reality is being reshaped, and things are not condemned to be as they have been defined. What is beautiful, what is ugly? For me, beauty is queer. It's something we can't grasp, in constant mutation, something magical we can't pin down. It is bizarre, confusing, ugly, fabulous, fascinating and yet sometimes considered repulsive. Fascinating, the reappropriation of certain stigmatising terms such as "freak", "queer" or "faggot", as a form of resistance, is what inspires and nourishes my work, through which I decide to reclaim my own monstrosity. Like a love letter to the abnormal, a farewell to the norm.

"The photographs of Matthieu Croizier portray desire, love, and excessive bodies on the verge of monstrosity. His self-portraits and photographs of partners examine various aspects of sexuality, presented here as an experimental vehicle of self-discovery and liberation. Particularly important is a detachment from traditional ideas concerning roles and beauty, which the artist's work seeks to question and to deconstruct. The series We Are All Gay Cyborgs (2024) is dedicated to various aspects of queer eroticism and uses elements from pop and subculture to depict new forms of desire and powerlessness. Individual body parts are often the focus of the intensely colourful images and lend a physical dimension to the act of viewing: a tongue touches a flower stem, a mouth closes over a plump fruit, a naked lover turns his back to the camera. Croizier breaks with the ordinary clichés and traditional roles of gay culture by staging hairy, deformed, full-figured bodies as erotic and autonomous. Queer desire is not portrayed in a fetishised way, but rather brought into focus with lust and playfulness." Text written by Jana Johanna Haeckel for the exhition Love, Maybe – Intimacy and Desire in Contemporary Art at Alexander Tutsek Stiftung, Munich.