Galleria Upp is pleased to present La Chambre de Labastrie, a solo show by the Polish artist and photographer Michal Martychowiec that has been mounted in the Gallery’s space on the island of the Giudecca in Venice.

The ambiguous play of the power of sight – denied yet induced – is structured inside this paradise of light. Immortalized in three groups of photographic portraits, the inhabitants of La chambre deLabastrie shift from being an object looked upon to becoming the subject of the looking.

Sight – the visitor’s privilege – is brusquely interrupted and reversed, interrogated by the disquieting looks of the men and women mounted silently on the walls. For Michal Martychowiec the image is a sacred space, a silent place, a place for solitude and fantastic and creative happenings. The universal need for continuous reflection in new images becomes impossible. To include the objectification of everyone’s intimate, interior needs, this series of photographs addresses individual interiority.

The unresolvedness of the prints makes it possible to grasp the connection between the subjective and the objective world, between inside and out, in a universal labyrinth – much like the one described by Benoît de Saint-Maure in Roman De Troie – enclosed, muffled, surrounded by alabaster, a place where exterior and interior take on a relative psychological meaning.

Catalogue essays by Marco Tagliafierro and Valentina Gervasoni

Michal Martychowiec (Lublin, 1987) lives and works in London and Berlin. He has exhibited in many solo and group shows, including the solo show "In memory" at the Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw (2013), "Pavilion 0" at Palazzo Donà in Venice (2013), and "Blue Red Green," a solo show at gift_lab inTokyo (2011).

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