Maya Rochat

Maya Rochat2

Maya RochatPhoto: Maya Rochat, MAGIC ROOTS from the series A ROCK IS A RIVER, 2018. Courtesy of Maya Rochat and Seen Fifteen, London

Maya Rochat

–Artists need to find new strategies to make their images beautiful and powerful.

-Who are you?


I am a Swiss visual artist working in the fields of photography, painting, video, performance and installation


-What do you do?


I like to play with painting, ink, watercolors, in contrast with acrylic and more aggressive paint. It's a way for me to reflect the world’s materiality. I use colors and matter as tools, a way to seduce or repulse. I use various materials from high end print, to digital print on plastic, glass or textile. Then I work with projections, and more recently I experimented with old school OPH projectors. I like to bind the old with the new, the natural with the artificial, reinventing the combinations, never getting to comfortable in a technique, creating multilayered collages. Quickly I discovered industrial advertising techniques that allowed me to print big and in color. I liked the idea to transfer such techniques into art, as a way to reappropriate public space and question the images (mostly advertisement) we accept to live with and how it subconsciously affect our ideas and desires.


-Why photography?


I love photography. As an artistic expression it's the closest copy we are able to make of the matter of reality. In that sense it tells a lot about «us». There is something fascinating in the representation of humanity. But now photography has a hard time to stay powerful in this mass media area, and artists need to find new strategies to make their images beautiful and powerful. A notion of invisibility and redundancy in photography appeared with the digitalization of medias. I started to be fed up by the amount of images, so much alike, that I questioned how we deal with this in the tangible world. Like in the digital, I observed a new process of «I look, I understand, I forget». In reaction, I started to materialize images that are complex enough not to be understood in one glance, but accessible enough that your brain/emotions are activated. There I started to experiment with painting, volumes, transparencies and layering. I want my work to be a physical as well as an intellectual experience.