Mazaccio & Drowilal

Elise Mazac and Robert Drowilal have worked together as the Mazaccio & Drowilal duo since 2009. Their work explores an abundance of various images – found in the media – which they appropriate and arrange into series that are both glitzy and caustic. In times of widespread addiction to images and social media, conceptual art, Pictures Generation and the Capitalist Realism movement of the 1960s also contribute elements to their reflection. When cultural industries use the pretence of information and entertainment to disseminate a consumerist ideology that shapes individual and collective imaginations, dreams and contemporary identities, M&D do not hesitate to alter images in order to divert them from their original use and to imbue them with a critical dimension. Through humour and derision, they question these archetypal forms, deconstruct representations and in doing so put the way we view the world into perspective. Through their use of appropriation, they subvert the notion of what an author is and blur the gap between professional and amateur, original and copy, work and fragment, in an act that combines artistic freedom and tribute to both history and the present.

Martine Michard

Translated by Lucy Pons, 2022