Thanks to Der Greif team for having invited me as a guest blogger!

To wrap up my “Odd and Ordinary” week, here’s a selection of brilliant and odd images by Martin Kollar. His work is a great source of inspiration in terms of both style and content. I’ve always been intrigued by his conceptual approach. Kollar’s images truly stand for themselves, even without captions or any explanation. As curator Lydia Dorner states, he “captures the disintegration of the permanent towards the temporary and the provisional, before coming, in turn, part of a certain posterity”. The series is called Provisional Arrangement. Cheers!

www.martinkollar.com

Leonardo Scotti is a photographer based in Milano. His works are mainly fashion and design still lives, but he calls himself a “street photographer” and I’ve always appreciated his eye for the crude uncanny of the everyday. In some of his (rigorously analogue) snapshots there’s something that reminds me of Ron Jude’s Vitreous China… though strongly affected by a colourful (after all, Italian) taste.

www.leonardoscotti.com

Bethan Hughes is an artist and researcher based in Leeds and Berlin. We met at the Bauhaus University in Weimar and she is currently a practice-based PhD candidate at the University of Leeds. Her latest works are enquiring into the contradictory ways in which 3D visualisation software has opened up new (virtual) spaces for artistic production.

The images here, a series of close-ups from renderings of latex and scaffolding (part of the Softbodies Series, 2017), use cloth simulation to explore notions of techno-tactility, digital (dis)embodiment and organic precarity.

Beth and I recently had the chance to work together on a series of tableau that will be published in the upcoming issue of San Rocco.

I got to know Tobias Faisst a few years ago and since then, his work has always resonated in my head. Probably because of a shared passion for the vernacular.

Tobias lives in Berlin, but recently traveled between Switzerland and Canada. His photographs – a mixture of found situations and enigmatic details – are carefully framed and developed. As he himself states: “his pictures do not have to be understood”.

Tobias is currently working on a new book called Eidos.

www.tobiasfaisst.com

Lauren Marsolier deconstructs and reassembles photographs. I often find myself looking at these beautiful fictive places, thinking if such idle set ups might really exist somewhere. There’s a certain fascination about her usage of form, colour and composition, with reminiscences of metaphysical painters De Chirico and Carrà.

In 2015 Marsollier was included in a panel discussion at the Tate Modern in London discussing contemporary landscape photography, along with fellow artists Thomas Struth, Penelope Umbrico, Massimo Vitali and Mishka Henner.

laurenmarsolier.com

The first photographer I’m introducing is Matthieu Lavanchy. Born in Switzerland, Matthieu attended ECAL in Lausanne and went for a residency at the School of Visual Arts in New York. His work is intriguing, quirky and brilliantly executed. This series, titled Home Economics, was developed for the British Pavillion at the 2016 Venice Biennale and depicts uncanny images of contemporary domestic life. The images embody a fine balance between a crispy commercial aesthetic and a loose collection of apparently meaningless everyday moments.

Note: the photographs were commissioned by the British Council and were presented alongside provocative statements, developed together with London based studio OK-RM.

matthieulavanchy.com

Hi everyone, here is Louis De Belle from Milano. While pondering on what to write for this take over, I figured out that I’ve always been drawn to things which are both unusual and banal. As a matter of fact, my latest project (Besides Faith) was pretty much dealing with these two aspects.

A few years ago, in order to better enquire into my field of interest, I decided to set up a small book series titled Forms of Formalism. The point was to gather photography and written contributions around the notion of form, its meaning and infinite possible facets (good and bad). Through this project, I got the chance to engage with fellow artist and broaden a critical discussion.

During this week, I’ll be posting the work of photographers, whom I know or I’m currently working with. Their practice can differ from one another. Yet somehow they’re all dealing with the odd, the ordinary and an overall strong sense of plasticity. Three aspects (I won’t say hastags!) that often recur in my work as well.