Michel Blazy

Michel Blazy maintains a certain wariness towards the notion of the work of art, in the sense of something matured and complete. He prefers a more homemade approach and the willingness of materials to live their own lives in his encouragment structures. Working with living (animal or vegetable) matter, with non solid substances (that stick, flow or foam), he explores microcosms of proximity, multiverses whose activity and constant metamorphoses are sometimes invisible to the naked eye. But Blazy is no more interested in reproducing the voice of things than was Francis Ponge. What interests him above all are the ways materials change. He works by the association of ideas (planting a straw broom so that it takes root) and creates situations that verge on the aberrant.

Whether he is heating plastic to the limits of its capacity to withstand deformation, or getting seeds to grow in a floorcloth, for Blazy the moment of contemplation always comes after he has achieved that miraculous equilibrium, like the builder of a house of cards holding his breath as he steps back to admire his edifice. When, in Les Suites et les fins (1995), he films the peregrinations of garden creatures, he does not ape naturalism but focuses instead on what are semi-constructed events (an insect running along a hosepipe, a spider tripping on a carpet) and plays on anthropomorphic allusions (fish, dumbfounded by a plastic bottle, an ant lost in a pool). But Blazy’s attitude is not hostile. On the contrary, he applies himself to designing environments that are hospitable, conductive to the development of his organisms. In the Projet d’habitat agreable aux insectes (1996), for example, at the Crestet art center, the piles of flavoured puree and necklaces of rotting tomatoes formed a pole of attraction for insects. Blazy’s creations do not seek to dramatise or put nature on stage so much as to facilitate the observation of its metabolisms at a dermatological level (mould, desiccation).

His installations are olfactory and tactile (dampness) as well as visible, but can be perceived only over time, as with his Mur qui pele, which peels gradually. Progress and catastrophe, success and failure are words that are out of context in Blazy’s work, in which the desire to see prevails over the will to know and control. In the words of the prehistoric man who narrates Roy Lewis’s novel The Evolution Man or How I Ate My Father, “I think our strenght will come from the fact that we are not specialists”.

Unlimited Contemporary Art

Francois Piron, Michel Blazy in catalogue Sensitive, Printemps de Cahors, Actes Sud editions, 2000, p 26.