Discovery Award 2024 Louis Roederer Foundation: Matan Mittwoch

The photographic installation The Sun is Broken challenges both representation and the tools with which it is produced. A muted violence imbued with the illusion of infinity erupts in the creation of these images, whether it be the capture of an intrusive action with a smartphone (Cracks) or the fabrication of a stellar landscape from a sheet of sandpaper (And the Stars Look Very Different Today). 

Cracks is born of an obstruction: the palm of a hand blocks the lens of a smartphone recording the action. The incident creates a glowing breach in the surface of the recorded image. The crimson red is none other than blood circulation. The resulting abstract photographs are akin to Lucio Fontana’s lacerations (Spatial Concepts). On the back of his incised canvases, the proponent of Spatialism inscribed the word attesa [expectation]. The incision opened onto an infinite space. In Matan Mittwoch’s work, the viewer now collides with the finite glass of the screen, as they gaze upon this incandescent breach. In both cases, the image arises from an act of violence, but Fontana’s historical gesture of liberation has here been transformed into an act of obstruction.

The obstruction mechanism is also at play in And the Stars Look Very Different Today. The infinite spatial landscape before us is but a decoy, since the work results from the superimposition of two photographs of sandpaper with different degrees of coarseness. The image imitates the infinite and thus questions the manufacture of scientific imagery, our expectations towards it and, more widely, the use of images as a means of propaganda. While the leap into the void may prove tempting, the risk is to come up against a flat but no less abrasive surface.