Mogarra reinvents the world at home, photographing things he loves, cheap little bits and pieces he usually rounds off with a few handwritten words. Each is part of a thematic whole, of a collection or narrative inspired by the artist’s life. Faced with the flagrant discrepancy between the image and what it supposedly represents, and with these differences of scale and mixes of registers, we burst out laughing; but maybe these seemingly innocuous pictures are unsettling for our ways of seeing and thinking, too.
David Barriet, David Benassayag, Béatrice Didier
Looking at Joachim Mogarra’s images, we can’t help thinking of the way kids, starting out with virtually nothing, construct an invented world where anything goes. Here a china dog straightaway takes on the substance of a real character; a kitchen funnel conjures up a black hole in some distant galaxy; four little towers turn a pomegranate bought on the market into a magically Oriental mosque; a teenager holding a pair of handlebars becomes the hero of a motorbike race. The Mogarra oeuvre is all about telling stories and inviting us to join in. Yet the obvious way he overdoes—or underdoes—things means we can’t just settle for laughing at his jokes. Behind every illusion another may be lurking. This DIY art strikes at travel to distant lands, scientific theories, aspects of civilisation and people’s identities; but also at photography’s ability to depict the world via reporting, portraiture, astronomy or architecture. This absurdist fun, though, seems primarily intended for personal use: just what’s needed to cut the different facets of the human comedy down to private theatre and so more or less domesticate the world. Maybe only photography lends itself to this kind of delightful transposition. At all events, it allows the expression of contradictory feelings and discrepant tastes. Seen in this light the Mogarra oeuvre is a paradoxical self-portrait, no sooner seen than it slips away.
David Barriet, David Benassayag, Béatrice Didier
Exhibition produced in collaboration with the galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois, Paris.
Framing by Plasticollage and Circad, Paris (for The Wonder of Photography).
