Collection de chaussures

Michel Blazy’s installations bring together mental worlds that, though quite distinct, are yet in a state of interaction. Collection de Chaussures comprises a structure of plinths inspired by the display racks found in shoe stores. Arrayed on the plinths are old athletic shoes, with plants growing in them, watered by a complex drip-irrigation system. While the shoes are a musing on the cult of speed and performance in our societies, the plants’ slow, inexorable growth points to their inevitable victory. The work was produced for the 57th Venice Biennale.
Michel Blazy was born in Monaco in 1966. It was during his time studying at the Villa Arson in the 1980s that he first created a piece incorporating living elements, seeking to answer a burning question. The artist has since fashioned an artistic world of the absurd, the perishable, the living, and of transformations. He uses everyday materials and living, organic matter found in his kitchen or garden, giving life to a strange and moving art. His installations are a meeting of materials, an attempt to stretch out a moment in time by drawing on different survival strategies. Blazy’s work questions the nature/culture dichotomy that arose with the development of Humanism in the Renaissance.
The artist has said: “My work is to do with the living, but not nature “. Blazy has developed an approach in which he enlists nature herself as a partner to create hybrids, works that occupy a reality quite different from that of inert matter, like the living. His creations reproduce and renew themselves, lasting through time. These objects are somehow chimeric, seeking to blur the lines that divide animal, vegetable, and mineral. They are much more about the process than the result. Each piece exists in its own time, ensuring that what each spectator sees is always unique.