That Moment When You Can See The Crack In The World
2022 - 2025

“‘A love letter to the abnormal, a farewell to the norm’, Matthieu Croizier’s work sets bodies free from the way they are supposed to look like. He tilts and twists paradigms to shape a world where the horizon’s line isn’t straight, and flesh is not condemned to order. The words ‘beauty’ and ‘ugliness’ cease to mean much, monstrosity is reclaimed as tender and spectacular, queerness is a magical and constant act of mutation. If the images that we are used to seeing define the things we’re able to imagine, That Moment Where You Can See The Crack In The World suddenly expands the coordinates of what we feel is possible. Reality has opened up, free and in flux.”

Text by PhMuseum’s visual editor Camilla Marrese


In my work, I generally seek to evoke the tension between opposing notions, such as beauty and ugliness, fascination and repulsion, the ordinary and the spectacular... "That moment when you can see the crack in the world" is an ongoing personal project on which I have been working for a year. Using the body as a raw material - my own or that of people close to me - I try to create the spectacular from the simple things around me.

The photographs depict an extraordinary act of metamorphosis, where fragments are melded together to create something new. Reality is being reshaped, and things are not condemned to be as they have been defined.

What is beautiful, what is ugly? For me, beauty is queer. It's something we can't grasp, in constant mutation, something magical we can't pin down. It is bizarre, confusing, ugly, fabulous, fascinating and yet sometimes considered repulsive. Fascinating, the reappropriation of certain stigmatising terms such as "freak", "queer" or "faggot", as a form of resistance, is what inspires and nourishes my work, through which I decide to reclaim my own monstrosity. Like a love letter to the abnormal, a farewell to the norm.