Mazaccio & Drowilal

Paparazzis

As part of the X anniversary of the Moscow International Biennale of Fashion and Style in Photography 2017, the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow presents ‘Paparazzis’, a project by the art group Mazaccio & Drowilal.
As material for their photo collages and installations the French artists Elise Mazac and Robert Drowilal, known as the art duo Mazaccio & Drowilal, use popular images of contemporary culture that are intentionally torn from their usual context. With the help of diverse techniques, deliberately bright colours and irony sharp as a razor, the artists transform these images and question the conventional principles of artistic photography.
By juxtaposing heterogeneous and often contradictory shots and blurring the boundaries between natural and artificial, Mazaccio & Drowilal provoke the viewer, who is doomed to balance on the verge of disgust and pleasure when confronted by the authors’ extraordinary artistic experiment.
In the Paparazzis project Mazaccio & Drowilal impose silhouette figures of celebrities cut out from the tabloids on idealised natural backgrounds, ‘placing’ them in stadiums and city streets. According to Elise Mazac, the starting point for this series was a collection of celebrity photos found in magazines or on the Internet. All the heroes of the future series were ‘captured’ by the paparazzis at a time when they were as relaxed as possible, going about their daily business: visiting shops and cafes, buying takeaway food, engaged in different sporting activities, etc. By adding pictures of stars to a variety of landscapes, the artists neutralise the sensational nature of those images coined by the paparazzis. ‘There is a shift from the sensational image of the star to the anonymous crowd. We found this really interesting,’ admits Robert Drowilal.