MAGNIFICATION - A conscious act of seeing

Magnification celebrates the aesthetics of the minimal photographic language, its manifestation, its embodiment, and its becoming trace. It's a tribute to the blow-up, an intervention of “ecology of the images” to re-see what has already been produced

On a series of manuals for photographic preservation, I decontextualized test images to reveal invisible structures and the relationship between photography and text. I liberated photographs from their secondary functions and gave them a new poetic identity. Magnification is a tribute to the blow-up and the bewilderment of the eye to understand the original process and the alteration into an abstract image. Enlargements of the earliest photographic processes since the advent of image reproduction: calotypes, photogravures, and halftones reveal an archaic beauty. Squares, dots and lines, colours juxtapose like brushstrokes, like new textures that recall natural surfaces and skins. The eye wanders, fluctuates and lingers on normally invisible details, on the wavy-lines that make a face three-dimensional, on the overlapping of grey and black squares, on the pattern of red and black hair, on the dotted motifs of the cyan wall behind a seated woman, on the superimposition of the four levels of colour printing: cyan, yellow, magenta and K (black) to create the roundness of an apple, on the distorted grain thanks to a wide screen used on rough paper which creates the effect of a spotted horse and on the brushstrokes of the hand-painted collotypes. Magnification is an intervention of the “ecology of the images” to re-see what has already been produced through enhanced awareness of our gaze because enlargement controls the visible and makes the unseen perceptible. The blow-up leads to a model of consciousness based on visibility. The act of enlarging an image is an epiphanic gesture that reveals how photographic technique transforms the real and makes us aware of the metaphor/ translation of the real image into a printed image, as well as of abstract aesthetics, regaining a new sense of sight. By removing their context and augmenting their proportions, the test images adopt and display an abstract aesthetic of obsolete techniques, decoding reality, through the téchne in a new, poetic language, in a form of communication that connects us with mysticism. Photography is treated as a medium, as a physical object, whose appearance is linked to the execution of mechanical operations. Magnification concerns photographic reproduction, the objects it produces, the subjects it involves, and the experiences it creates. A fragment of the whole image becomes a new photograph: it is born from the cut, from the re-composition with the original image, and the exposition in a new context by displacing its semantic field. The titles of the works connect the blow-up to the original image.