Portraits with funnels

After the exposure in September 1999, within the framework of VISA FOR the IMAGE in PERPIGNAN, this new presentation of the “Portraits to the Funnel” confirms the omnipresence of the symbol-funnel in the artistic course of Marc-Andre 2 FIGUERES.
For MA2F, the funnel, familiar ustensil, diverted its daily function, become object. Object of a revealing concept of a duality: posed on its basis, theconvex one is male, turned over it is concave and female.
MA2F transfigures the funnel in exception hermaphrodite.
The timeless repetition of the funnel through various techniques (painting-sculpture-photography….), becomes the paradigm of a new coherence.
This gesture of appropriation of the funnel creates work and work concretizes the gesture. The object-funnel is done interactive and the gesture of the artist concentrates it in his seriality.
By proposing its object-fetish, MA2F establishes a indéfectible complicity between its collectors and itself :
“I expressed the need to capture an image of my collectors. Through my works, they have part of me. I wanted thus to perennialize a relation which is erased sometimes with time, and to create a work which would plastically translate this connection artist/collector. A simple photographic trace was not enough for me. To propose the funnel as bond was essential immediately. The funnel, only object which virtually never contains anything, is the perfect symbol of space zero. It is crossing point, intermediary, at the same time in hollow and relief, container and contained and, at the same time, any of both. This photography enables me to reverse the process collector/artist and remains faithful to the concept of hermaphrodism. ”
MA2F employs photography, not like system, but like expressive medium of a relation, highlighting the surviving technique of the print, concept carrying all its research, using a support (photography), a gesture (to propose a funnel) and forming a mark (the portrait).
This print produces a result, the concrete trace of the gesture but also a whole of images, reminiscences of the phantasm of the penetration of the substrate by the object giving rise to a reproduction, a physical copy of the model.
The subject photographed is put in situation according to conditions of installation defined by MA2F.
The model wearing black, placed on a black bottom, is photographed in black and white. It chooses beforehand one or more funnels among the personal collection of the artist (500 parts) and adopts an attitude with the object. The installation, spontaneous or reflected, reveals to be to it model. “The constraints are limited exclusively to the environment. My models are put in foot or sitted in front of a black bottom and must evolve/move within this framework. Clothing is voluntarily black so as to make disappear the body and emphasize the face, the hands and the selected funnel. ”
This collection of funnels, accumulated by MA2F, translated the protean aspect of this instrument: each funnel is different even if it generally obeys an equation which gives him a diameter equal to its height. “I position in observer of funnels which, by their varieties, resemble human diversity. We have all the same attributes and yet nobody resembles himself. ”
Each photography is worked over again with acrylic painting, Sun-Paint (proceeded of photosensitive painting which reacts in a way progressive and reversible to the solar rays, that MA2F is alone to employ), of phosphorus and the pencil. The first name of each collector is burst and dispersed in the whole of the composition.
“I chose photography in black and white to remove the immediacy. It is timeless and nearer to a concept of hermaphrodism with the full one and the vacuum and black and white contrast. On this seized territory, I affix my own traces, with additions of painting, but also of the scratches, closer to the sculpture, removals of the black matter to reach the blank paper under photography. The thick metal framework which encircles the photograph increases this dimension of sculptural depth. ”
MA2F seeks, by the use of photography, the expressivity of the object. It seizes the funnel to dispute of them its practical values and of exchange and, by its extraversion, conceives a dialectical news of the collector ratio/artist.