Sébastien Reuzé, 'Mascletà': PLUS-ONE GALLERY (NEW SOUTH)

Sébastien Reuzé
‘Mascletà’
16.05 – 16.06.2024

In the warmth of a compact crowd, staring up at the sky, the anticipation is palpable. The first explo-sion suddenly breaks the silence and lacerates the blue sky with its powdery trail. It is instantly fol-lowed by a succession of other explosions, countless in number, which accelerates until the final climax, a deafening and euphoric chaos. For just a few minutes, the sky over this March afternoon exploded into a visual and auditory fiction.

As the coloured smoke gradually dissipates, the body is still vibrating. Passed through by this sonic fire, it feels its waves for a moment longer, before slowly returning to the surrounding reality.
Sébastien Reuzé was part of the electrified crowds catching their breath that day.
The pure sensations he experienced instinctively mingled with reminiscences of the carnival festivi-ties of his childhood in Nice. These evoked memories of fireworks thundering over the sea and of King Carnaval burning on the beach with its reflections dancing on the water.

The Mascletà series alone encapsulates all these vivid impressions. It is part of a wider visual reper-toire that Sébastien Reuzé has been building up since his early days in photography, that of the daz-zling.
Indeed, many of his works tend towards that tipping point between brutal blindness and pure pleas-ure. His emblematic Soleil series is a case in point, as it seeks to radiate its presence to those who look at it. But the artist’s fascination with light and the different ways in which it appears runs through all his work, reminding us of the solar culture that underpins his origins. Light is important at every stage, because it is also an essential working material when he uses analog photography. It is the basically the same light source that penetrates the film before splashing onto our eyes once it has been printed.

With Mascletà, Sébastien Reuzé is looking to convey the singular energy of a moment of rare intensi-ty. The spectacle of fireworks in broad daylight and the collective fever that accompanied it left a lasting imprint on his flesh. The aim of the series is to celebrate and transcribe this sensitive experi-ence. With this in mind, Sébastien Reuzé explores the very body of his prints in the darkroom. He subjects them to treatments and burns that make them unique and explode the images into sublime abstractions.
By deliberately avoiding any reference points in most of his photographs, the artist makes our hori-zons waver, inviting us to join him in an experience of vertigo. Finally, the series unfolds in a rhyth-mic cadence that evokes the feverish acceleration of the pulse to the sound of detonations. Unreal colours and obscure stains push the sky views into abysses that are as much apocalyptic drama as ecstasy.

Marie Papazoglou, 2024