Mauchi
Mauchi has been a photographer for over 20 years
Taking photographs is a visual gesture for Mauchi. It is like a “wei wu wei”, an effortless gesture. It is an easy, self-aware, immediate action, which requires expertise and technical mastery.
Mauchi’s artistic gesture is beyond the dimension of time. It would be wrong to look for the logic of time in this collection of his works. Kundera writes, “Perhaps we become aware of our age only at exceptional moments and most of the time we are ageless”. We are reminded of that by Mau Chi’s work, which becomes like an album collecting an everyday reality beyond the horizontal line between the past and the present. His is instead a vertical thought portraying the meanings of things when they happen together, in a dimension where past and present are both missing.
Mauchi uses the camera like an extension of his vision of the world that he sees black and white, it is essential that one be with the other, like the yin and yang from which all things are originated.
Black is cold, dark, deep, and inert. Which coexists with white, which is warm, clear, superficial, dynamic. In this chromatic geography, grey becomes an undetermined color and is complementary only to itself.
Mauchi is pushing the limits of the photographic gesture by composing graphics, signs and designs.
Like in “grass style” of the chinese calligraphy, throughout his work, Mauchi, seeks to form the harmony which is found in nature. This is conveyed throught each object of representation. Such harmony is often no longer recognizable even at the eyes of the most careful observer. In fact, Mauchi portrays the relations happening even inside things in order to observe their complexity. He increases the contrasts and uses many layers of geometries, densities, borders and reflexes.
According to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the observer, in the very act of observing, produces some inevitable alterations of reality. The same thing happens in Mauchi’s work. The representation of reality, in the photographer’s view, becomes uncertain and undetermined. It shows no given certainty because reality can have many certainties. Thus, Mauchi leads us to doubt the real validity of his own observations, while expressing in his work the delusive vacuity of the appearance.
His shots produce a system of stratifications and repetition, in which the actual reality disappears constantly to make room for a synesthetic sensation at times playful, surreal, symbolic experimentations of the subconscious and immersed subtely.
Elisabetta Rizzuto