L'Ahah, Rue Griset, Solo Show, Paris, 2018
in collaboration with L'Ahah Paris

Ceci n'est pas une photo
Lena Amuat and Zoë Meyer use photography to reveal things that do not exist
Text by Stefano Casciani

At the start of the 1930s, Max Ernst and Man Ray visited the Institut Henri Poincaré in Paris, which had been recently opened in honor of the French mathematical genius, founder of topology and pioneer of chaos theory. They found a collection of “mathematical objects” of the sort used since the second half of the 1800s to illustrate the impossibilities of the real made possible thanks to non-Euclidean geometries. Seduced by the sculptural beauty of those
things, they talk about them with Christian Zervos, editor of the magazine Cahiers d’Art. In the issue of May 1936 Zervos published the text by Andre Breton “La crise de l’objet“ with their photographs, made by Man Ray: he used those objects in various works, from the more famous Non-Euclidean Object of 1932 to the series of paintings Shakespearean Equations at the end of the 1940s.
Lena Amuat and Zoë Meyer seem to have been touched by a similar fate when in their search for sub/ob-jects to show the world they ran into some models
of mathematical objects that were still stored but long neglected. They began
a long photographic inspection of those objects, but with one fundamental difference. For the Surrealists those “impossible” things also represented the possibility of breaking free from the merciless laws of Euclidean geometry
and its rationality, while for Amuat and Meyer they seem merely archaeo-analogical relics in the digital age. They too, at this point, are subjected to
the same laws that govern the existence of the real: the digital society also lives and functions in keeping with other algorithms, always more incredibly complex and ”intelligent.” The fate of people and things is influenced by the planned randomness of the web, the most powerful technology of social control ever established. So the only – the most political – freedom left is that of the artist who decides, in any case, to make a work with her/his own hands: better
still if it is done with photography, which will arrest it in a single instant, from a single vantage point, with the reflections and colors of the moment, and those of the materials selected for the backdrop. Because Amuat & Meyer like to take risks. They decide to use production and reproduction of the object/works with analog techniques, therefore with limited possibilities of retouching, adjustment, deception: the sets are assembled and photographed
in the studio, without delegating any part of the process to others. They come from a solid photography background, at HDK in Zurich, from a central European culture where the object has been exalted – with the photography of the Neue Sachlichkeit – then defiled and then venerated, still with the same rigor: starting with Cabaret Voltaire and winding up with the theories of Max Bill on the Gute Form. Amuat & Meyer began by showing their work in Zürich,
followed by Paris, Surrealist territory. One of the first to take notice was disegno*, and they have continued their photographic campaign on the non-existent, now under the watchful gaze of international criticism, all the way
to the publication of a magical little book, Mathematische Modelle 2009-2015.
More than photographs, they make hyperrealistic compositions for hypothetical abstract/concrete paintings, where the third dimension of the objects is only suggested by the color and the positioning against a neutral backdrop: no cultural references, no biographical suggestions, no emotion. The observer has to do everything on his own, recreating a personal, imaginary story about the nature of what can be seen in the photographs. The subjects of their other images are no less enigmatic. They bring with them something of the mathematical models, seeming like other tools of scientific knowledge, like the wings of birds of prey, castings of meteorites, statues or architecture. All pages torn from an instruction manual for the use of the world, which the two artists have rediscovered with their photographic eye: not without a bit of humor and compassion for the lonely life of things that do not exist, at least not until someone like them comes along to reveal them to the world. Recently, besides representing “things,” Amuat & Meyer have begun to construct them,
presenting them both in photographs and in installations.
Defying definition, useless and inexplicable, they seem like a metaphysical attempt to make objects survive that could otherwise truly vanish: the
last memory of a real world that does not exist, or no longer exists.
(published in: disegno. la nuova cultura industriale, vol. 6)


L'Ahah