For the last several years Mathieu Latulippe has been developing projects that, not without humour, force a reevaluation of our systems for apprehending and understanding the surrounding world, its basic situations and its agreed-upon models. “Enter the serious and mock it, and in so doing push back the limits of what might seem credible,” Latulippe’s propositions take the form of videos, installations and, at other times, the staging of various situations. La Grande Photographie – The Bigshots puts forward a skillfully handled consideration of contemporary photography’s guiding principles, its parameters and its fashion-effects. With great wit and a touch of cynicism, this exhibition calls into question the recurrent use of monumental formats in contemporary photography and the implicit sensationalism it contains. Composed of five exhibition models, a microscope and prints hung on the wall, the show literally mocks at the manipulation of scale while unfailingly remaining pertinent, and it is precisely in the space of such ambiguity that Latulippe’s art works. If man had not managed to quench his thirst for grandeur with the image beginning with the great nineteenth century panoramas, 1980s photography and its much ballyhooed entry into the art world have literally blown open the medium’s paradigms since. But here, one finds less interest in the gigantic photos we are so used to seeing. One finds rather stamps, passport photos – some taken from microbiology, or again the simple 4” x 6” formats well known from amateur and home use. Brilliantly and comically interrogating photography’s development, Mathieu Latulippe casts a critical, and “amused” gaze on our relationship to dimension in art and on the “society of size” humanity has been unable to avoid feeding with images.
[YP, trans PdB]
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