Everything Goes Dark A Little Further Down is a love letter to the abnormal. Taking visual cues from an array of cultural sources, Croizier lets his imagination run wild when taking pictures. Inspired by everything from 19th Century medical archives and freak shows, to cult classic horror like David Lynch’s Eraserhead, he explores the idea of monstrosity in relation to his own queerness.
In his photographs, Croizier fragments, distorts and draws upon his own body parts, constructing surreal and pseudo-scientific scenes where his head and hands, ears and feet become the centre of his studies. Set in his apartment, Croizier creates a monstrous show in order to highlight that normal and abnormal are only social constructions, and the importance of the role of the image.
“The images in Everything Goes Dark A Little Further Down are weird and playfully, deliberately perverse. An array of body parts are seen in fragments throughout – torsos appear without arms, feet crush heads, bodies contort, faces melt, brains explode. In one self-portrait, the artist has manipulated the photograph to make his head appear severed but alive, his eyes still alert and staring into the lens. In another, he holds a mannequin, kissing it, and in it that act creates his own, disturbed version of a mirror image – one side flesh and blood, the other just soulless plastic. Elsewhere, Croizier draws a grid across his body in thick, black marker, echoing pictures from the medical and pseudo-scientific archives he spent time devouring for research. “The body is primordial in this work,” he says. “Our own body is the most ordinary thing to each of us, and yet the most secret. Bodies are beautiful, unique and political. In reference to anatomical iconography, I try to deconstruct normative representations of the body, with a view of asking questions such as ‘to what extent is a body a body?’ and ‘how can it free itself from the norms that constrain it?’”
“To me,” he muses, “this work is a celebration of the renunciation of being normal.” It’s a project for anyone who's ever had the guts to truly, monstrously, fabulously, be themselves.
Extract from a text written by Joanna L. Cressell, published in Lens Culture, August 2021
About the artist
Matthieu Croizier (1994, he/him) is an artist and freelance photographer based in Lausanne, Switzerland. He graduated from the Photography School of Vevey (CEPV) in 2017 and from the Bachelor Photography at ECAL in 2020.
Edition of 800 copies
220 x 272 mm, portrait
116 pages
ISBN: 9781907071874
