Matthieu Croizier – Everything goes dark a little further down
Matthieu Croizier investigates the slippy boundaries of the normal and the abnormal through a forensic examination of his own body
This project investigates the idea of an ordinary monstrosity and the boundaries between the normal and the abnormal through a study of my own body. As a starting point, I focused on the role played by the image in the construction of the monstrosity, from freak shows to the invention of hysteria in the 19th century, where staging was essential. Incredible stories were invented, images were manipulated, hysteria attacks were triggered on command in front of an audience; abnormality was exhibited only for the show, drawing a very clear line between it and normality; a line that I want to blur.
Through self-representation, I seek to fabricate a monstrosity out of simple things surrounding me. By doing so, I want to reveal what is hidden in each of us and to embrace it rather than to reject it, using my own body, the first ordinary body to offers itself to me, as a malleable material to compose my images.
In reference to medical or anatomical iconography, I try to deconstruct normative representations of the body in order to build new ones. To what extent is a body a body, and how can it free itself from the norms that constrain it? Although the aesthetic of the images is spectacular, one can realize that everything is staged and that it is only a show of banalities. In an absurd and playful way, the monstrosity which seems dark and disturbing at a first glance, ends up revealing its own construction.
Matthieu Croizier was born in 1994 in Geneva, Switzerland. He obtained a CFC of photography at CEPV (Centre d’enseignement professionnel de Vevey) and then entered ECAL (Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne) where he recently graduated from the Bachelor Photography. He is now working as an artist and a freelance photographer in Lausanne.