The exhibition Agrégat is an invitation to two artists, Bastiaan van Aarle and Michel Mazzoni, to initiate a dialogue between their works and in relation to the exhibition spaces at Contretype. The definition of the term 'aggregate' - a heterogeneous assembly of elements that adhere firmly to one another - sets the tone for this exhibition, which has been designed as an unexpected yet aesthetically relevant encounter between two radically different photographic practices.

Bastiaan van Aarle, a Dutch-speaking artist based in the Antwerp region, is developing a body of work on the landscape as a pretext for research into the grammar of photography, its limits and the way in which it conditions our perception of reality. His approach is characterised in particular by investigations into light, whether as the subject itself or as the primary condition for the existence of his photographs. Bastiaan van Aarle also likes to turn the exhibition of his works into a daring scenographic experience, extending the shooting and positioning visitors at the centre of a particular perceptual space/time. Michel Mazzoni, a French-speaking artist based in Brussels, follows a plastic and minimalist approach, resolutely at odds with traditional photography and dedicated entirely to exploring the visual field. As a keen observer of his environment, he endeavours to make visible insignificant, precarious or neglected elements, like so many details of reality that are a priori unimportant. Working with solids, voids, asperities and the out-of-range, shadows and light, his fragmented images - which could be described as impure insofar as they do not respect the aesthetic orthodoxy of photography - are displayed according to the locations that accommodate them, in ever-changing ways of printing (formats, play on scale, etc.), printing and mounting on walls or in space. Like punctuation marks, they interact with the architecture and the surrounding space, making them visually flexible and attempting to capture specific moments, suspended in time.

Agrégat is a wager, a fun wager, the wager of a successful rapprochement between works that are, on the face of it, incompatible. Taking up the challenge, Bastiaan van Aarle and Michel Mazzoni have accepted the awkwardness and risk of working together in parallel, each pushing their own photographic thinking to meet that of the other, going as far as to jointly devise the exhibition as a unique forum for visual exploration. Their dialogue began with a paper edition of Bastiaan van Aarle's Waterlijn series. For this series, Bastiaan van Aarle worked on photographs of familiar landscapes, using linear lines to represent the sea level in these landscapes if all the ice in the Arctic melted. This visual dystopia creates tension between two different temporalities and two different mental projections. In his edition, he plays with the transparency of the paper to reveal the lines from one page to the next. For the exhibition, he treated the walls of Contretype like the pages of a book, carrying the drawing from one wall to another, severing its link with the original image but opening a new space in which Michel Mazzoni's photographic gestures can interact, and vice versa. The photographic proposals of the two artists interact like false reflections, folds, unfolding and refolding... Together, they bring out something of strange beauty, like "the beauty of the chance meeting on a dissection table of a sewing machine and an umbrella1”

Olivier Grasser curator

1 in Les chants de Maldoror – Isidore Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont