Artist: Michael Roy
Exhibition title: All Rights Reserved
Venue: House of Chappaz, Valencia, Spain
Date: June 2 – July 28, 2023
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and House of Chappaz, Valencia
Note: Exhibition’s text by Eduardo García Nieto is available here
The HOUSE OF CHAPPAZ FLAT Gallery (València) inaugurated on Friday June 2nd at 19:00h. the exhibition “All Rights Reserved” by Michael Roy.
“The exhibition is based on ellipsis and on the ability of its audience to complete those spaces with their aesthetic, political and cultural baggage.
There have been many attempts in the cultural context of the second half of the last century to work, enunciate and articulate the void.
From the beginning we find ourselves immersed in the text, both visual and written, there is no out-of-field, only that brief moment in which we frame, continuing with the assembly of our inherited memories. Even so, that fullness is full of gaps. When Foucault, during his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, begins his speech by wishing that this would be “the point of his possible disappearance”.
In the case of Michael Roy everything leads to the story, not only because of his approach to the novel or because the literary text is one of his main sources of inspiration, but because this device of knowledge operates in the same way as the image, as a learned space in which the inherited materials return to nourish the gaps.
We are confronted with emptiness, with the fact that matter is full of it, therefore, the distance -the void- between bodies is almost smaller than the bodies themselves and all of them generate a longing, a need to fill spaces and feel close.
Our ideas of distance and proximity have been complicated by trauma, the difficult construction of desire has become even more complex. This is not to say that it is not satisfied, but to try to understand that the word, the verb, is a body that remains hidden because its visuality is full of “blind spots”. In fact, in the exhibition, the limits of the images, their borders, are only broken when they are transformed into text, when it becomes an amalgam of superimposed bodies or an inscription in our own. All of them enclosed in the white monochrome of a supposed neutrality that, in the end, what invites us is to fill it, to give meaning to our search to know the others.”
Text by Eduardo García Nieto (Independent curator and educator).
Michael Roy, 1973, born in La Rochelle, currently lives and works in Madrid and Valencia. Michael Roy’s work is particularly about doing without doing: making a film without a camera, creating a work of art from pre-existing images or texts, a fiction based on other fictions. He crosses universes, combines universes, invites us to appropriate his works and fictions in order to let us create our own. He uses the cyanotype technique to take photographs without a camera and present portraits of people in ecstasy.
The background of the situations he presents to us is impossible to decipher, as he does not provide any additional information, we can only imagine the context.
From fiction to reality, from the common to the personal: the artist builds a complex framework as a body of work using sometimes true facts and sometimes fictional elements, mixing partially written texts, images or photographs, playing and erasing traces, causing us to find ourselves near and far at the same time. All this through stories that belong to us, but that in a different way are as familiar as they are strange.
