Mazaccio & Drowilal have been working for several years from the images seen everywhere in our daily lives: photographs, adverts, screenshots, visual reproductions or fragments picked up on the Internet. Their work not only involves reusing them, but also observing what becomes of the images when they are constantly seen everywhere and often consumed very rapidly.

With Paravent Pictures, this thinking takes on a more physical dimension. The artists no longer see the image as a mere surface to be looked at, but as an object entirely in its own right. The works are made from photographic prints, plastic, adhesives, straps, paint or recycled materials. Within these the images are folded, hung, assembled, sometimes in an almost makeshift way. You can see the fastenings, structures and supports keeping them in place. Nothing is hidden.

The exhibition title reflects this approach. The English word picture denotes both the image and the object bearing it. This is an important nuance in understanding the work of Mazaccio & Drowilal: an image never exists independently of its medium, its method of production and the space in which it appears.

This shift in their approach became clear after a stay of several months in New York in 2017. Moving into a new and much more spacious studio when they returned transformed their way of working. Now it was possible to store materials, make larger pieces and directly manipulate photographic prints, which opened up new directions. Their work then gradually moved away from the single space of the screen or of digital editing and became more constructed, more manual, closer to sculpture and painting.

The works in Paravent Pictures sometimes evoke mobile panels used as decor or screens, the French word paravent meaning exactly that. Historically, a paravent, or screen, was used to separate, protect, disguise or organise the space. Here, it also becomes a way of thinking about images: surfaces which reveal as much as they hide, which filter our gaze and alter the way we move about.

In this practice we can see the distant heritage of Cubist collages or Pop Art assemblage, where fragments of real life were already making their way into the work. But with Mazaccio & Drowilal, these aspects take on a very free and often amusing tone, with visual experimentation being as important as the message itself. Behind the apparent lightness of the forms and image associations, Paravent Pictures challenges our way of looking in a world saturated with imagery.