The work Florent Mattei has been building for the past decade invites reflection on the profoundly human ideal of perfection, and the impossible, derisory seduction that translates in publicity images and art. Florent Mattei catches our eye, now stereotypical and passive, by capturing accidents, parasites in his photographs. In his series Les Incontrôlables, he turns the original meaning from an seemingly ultra-controlled image with a detail that condemns it to ridicule. In The world is perfect, he seems to make fun of himself by inventing a jet set universe. Going in the opposite direction, in the series L’Île fantastique, he transforms reality into fiction, cementing real couples into a stereotypical attitude of what constitutes the ideal family. In this way, the artist questions malleable identity, infested with codes and finally reduced to nothing with Nobody, a series of self-portraits where only the accessory changes. My life extends this work of denaturation of visual codes by proposing, why not, a reappropriation of an object too strongly symbolized : the habit. Posing with a woman and child, both in habits, Florent Mattei invents a fight to free an object of its chains of meaning. A nice proposal to contrast laughter with fear.

Top 48: July 4, 2006, blistering hot summer day. Florent Mattei danses alone in his living room for two hours and fifty five minutes. In front, a camera to give evidence to the effort, behind, 48 tracks found and compiled, from Tino Rossi to Philippe Katerine, more or less methodic inventor of music that have marked his life.

Each time, the play and laughter infect the codes and conventions of the image, leaving the field open to tell other stories. Or then the burlesque becomes a fresh reappropriation of the world.