The degenerate gaze. A house of one’s own

Gabriel Mauron’s photography collection examines the phenomenon of “unfinished houses that have been constructed with who knows what hopes, but too quickly become old and uninhabited, new and incomplete. The vestiges of an abandoned dream”. Mauron’s photographs act like a spotlight, raising questions and inciting us to reflect. It is incredible how one’s gaze becomes “accustomed” to everyday domestic landscapes, rendering objects – or rather, artifacts – invisible and nonexistent from a cadastral point of view, despite their physical presence. It leads us to view a familiar and incomplete landscape as a stable and definitive fact, rather than a moment in a process or a form in development. It is as though these everyday scenes subsist in a paradoxical harmony that no longer distracts the eye or the mind, as a certain permanence takes up residence in these open construction sites. Mauron’s photography brings to light scenes of abandonment and landscapes that are impure and incongruent, wavering between beauty and unsightliness, between order and disorder. These landscapes are paradoxical, dissonant and “misguided”. They are works of contrast that surrender the in-complete and the in-finite to a more secular understanding that is free of any aesthetic or moral judgment that may naturally lead us to justify their incongruity.