WORKERS 2016
Workers, a series produced with industrial rubber gloves in which, in a ploy that is atypical for him, Paolo Topy arranged the subject that is presented and photographed. This iconoclastic gesture evokes the modernist movements that, in turn, deconstructed, fragmented and deformed – in a nutshell, manipulated – the body throughout the 20th century. Despite being absent, the body is still very present through evocation alone: the point of the gloves is to protect it from a dangerous environment. Another body bursts into this series in an unexpected manner: the artist’s, who acts upon the gloves through the gesture of arranging them as a subject to be photographed. That gesture, the artist’s physical intervention, echoes the thought process, the mental organization that systematically precedes the photographic act, which simply reveals.
Yves Peltier