The pictures are not what they are – or the double misleading of the viewer. Two young and interesting photo artists from the South of France present their recent works in a joint exhibition at FOTOHOF.

Jean Baptiste Ganne shows an extract from his extensive cycle of work: “The Illustrated Capital” – whereby the theses of Marx’s social and economic theory form the basis for his work. These theses serve Ganne as templates, as it were, as captions and content guidelines for his medium-sized colour photographs, which have been taken over the past five years. Ganne works with classical photography. A keen observer of contemporary social developments, his photographs and texts pose questions that prompt the viewer to reflect further. His work is subject to the phenomenon that the original meaning and significance of the photograph is often reversed by the addition of Marx’s citation and thus given a new meaning.

Maxime Matray works as a multimedia artist with various media. His images, large-format offset prints and photographs, are the end product of staged installations and creations. His meticulously constructed visual worlds, with strong elements of surrealism, put the viewer to an exciting test: is what is seen appearance or reality? A question that can rarely be answered unequivocally, because Matray moves on the fine line between illusion and reality.

Both artists live and work in Nice and Amsterdam respectively and are active members of the art group “La Station” in Nice, which has transformed itself from the “underground” into one of the established art/artist institutions. Its members are almost all graduates or students of the Villa Arson, one of the most important and renowned art schools in France.