Following a formal research in photography, Thibault Hazelzet manipulates and plays with the introspective codes of the self-portrait.
Each piece in his new series, Self-portraits, is the result of a double exposure. On the same negative, the artist first photographs his own body, onto which he then superimposes a photograph of roughly spattered paint. In this way, despite a smooth, reflective surface, these ‘abstract’ Self-portraits reveal a pictorial, expressionist material, which allows bumps, drips and thickness to show through.
Each self-portrait seems to be lit with a raw and penetrating light, which the print, produced from a negative, reinforces with a striking reversal of colours and values.
These Self-portraits are ultimately more of an incantation than a representation of the face of the artist, because this face is, at the same time, apparent and elusive. His position is deliberately ambiguous, unstable. He draws his body with photography and enhances it with painting. He distances the flesh but summons the spirit: leaving only a print, an abstraction, an evocation... Thibault Hazelzet uses two techniques, photography and painting and surprisingly it is not an escalation of form and meaning that we see but rather a deliberate creation of invisibility. Although an invisibility loaded with physical presence.
