Samuel Dématraz

"In-N-Out" photography exhibition at ZONE 30 ART PUBLIC

The result of a two-part photographic survey carried out in Los Angeles, In-N-Out presents a series of post-war Californian houses in six kaleidoscopic prints that are as fragmented as they are unified.

For this project, Samuel Dématraz is interested in the Case Study Houses, a kind of experiment in building initiated by John Entenza (1905-1984), an American journalist and architect, between 1945 and 1966 around Los Angeles. The aim of this programme was to build modern, functional and economical individual houses that incorporated technological advances and could be reproduced in series in response to the return of millions of soldiers. Here, the six photographic collages by the artist from the Valais show interiors and exteriors of homes designed by Rudolf Schindler (1887-1953), Craig Ellwood (1922-1992), Pierre Koenig (1925-2004) and John Lautner (1911-1994), some of the most fashionable architects of the day. Samuel Dématraz is interested in the state and status of these buildings today, whether they have fallen into disrepair, are still in their original state or have been transformed into tourist businesses. As a videographer and photographer, he documents these Californian houses from every angle, taking extremely detailed shots which he then reassembles into new images to capture the essence of the buildings. The artist's visual mosaics then form coherent entities, each shot seeming like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle to be reassembled, to create a scene that is as plausible as it is utopian, in the image of the architectural project it evokes.

BIOGRAPHY
After studying philosophy at the University of Fribourg, Samuel Dématraz graduated from ECAV (now EDHEA) in 2006 with a Bachelor's degree in visual arts, and has since been working in the field of video, from scriptwriting to editing. As a photographer and video artist, he has won various prizes, grants, invitations and residencies in Switzerland, France and Italy. His work has been selected for the Cannes Film Festival in 2011 and the Solothurn Film Festival in 2015. Samuel Dématraz has taken part in numerous group exhibitions in Zurich, Neuchâtel, Thun, Valence, Brigue, Paris, Bienne, Basel and Mulhouse, and took part in the Salon Suisse at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2016.

His photographic and video work mainly takes the form of fragmented images, cut into several sequence shots, forming harmonious visual mosaics.