Patrick Mimran. Out of focus

Born in Paris in 1956, Patrick Mimran is a multidisciplinary artist. Since the 1980s he has created works and installations using almost all possible means and supports, ranging from photography to technology, from music to multimedia.

The exhibition

In Out of focus, the artist worked mainly on the lack of sharpness, not only of the outlines, but of the entire image. If initially the image appears abstract, the more you look at it the more you will grasp those details that bring it closer to reality. This contrasts with the sharpness of the smaller format color images that accompany and define the large photographs.

If the photographic tool was designed to represent reality as it is, Mimran seems to use it in reverse. For the artist, the best way to capture a subject, living or inanimate, is not to represent it as faithfully as possible, but to move away from it to the point of abstraction.

«We find ourselves in the dimension of the unconscious, in a perpetual iconographic flow of indefinable figures, which challenge the public eye to trace the original geometry. It seems like a work constructed solely to leave room for ambiguity, because photography, contrary to its instrumental composure, is pure lie. Here then Mimran reaps the fruits of that illusion of truth and takes a fairy-tale dimension by the hand and makes it her own. On this uncontrollable limit, the observer is given the sovereignty to freely interpret this re-elaboration of reality.»

Denis Curti, curator of Le Stanze della Fotografia