MICHEL AJERSTEJN

These creations come from different techniques in which the graphic artist isolates and recomposes urban scenes that he transposes on all kinds of possible and sometimes unusual mediums. Thus, he uses diverse and complementary industrial materials : translucent for the armoured glass and Plexiglas, metallic for the stainless steel and dibond materials, iridescent for photographic paper, raw and natural for wood. His work is based on combining techniques that ally painting, pasting, moulding , and digital photography.
Michel Ajerstejn uses different photographic and plastic processes in order to create a piece of artwork. The original photography is reworked and reinvented thanks to the "artist’s instinct", following the latest digital techniques, and can eventually be repainted on certain zones.
The combinations used and the diversions of the mediums bring Michel Ajerstejn's artworks powerful symbolism as well as a great innovative quality

The pieces are made in eight editions, signed and numbered, though some are one-off items.

Michel Ajerstejn reinvents the function of armoured glass, an industrial medium and offers us a series of Portraits and Object Representations treated with originality and minimalism. He plays with the square-patterned transparency on which the image becomes filtered, marked and magnified thanks to the various intensities of light. The metal threads of the armoured glass blend with the represented subject like a filigree, redefining a new photographic image. These striking pictures display the artist’s will to reinvent his own vision of photography. This groundbreaking artistic concept is quite unique and was initiated by Michel Ajerstejn in the 2000’s.

Objects : The staging of the selected objects, including "Continental Machine", "Escarpins", "Téléphone", reveals the power that the objects have in our everyday life and the importance of their design. Cut from their original context, the "cult" objects are represented as living witnesses of an era. Their initial function is removed by the artist in order to highlight their esthetical value. The scenes represented are covered in numbers, words, texts, signs that then become pure graphic ornaments.

Portraits : The close-up portraits present faces imprisoned by different obstacles and society norms. Michel Ajerstejn works around his favorite topics: urbanism, identity, human beings becoming plain objects in our society, and design. Thanks to its thickness and relief, the armoured glass is for Michel Ajerstejn the ideal medium to transpose his artistic expression and deliver his thoughts at a time when our liberties are mostly controlled. The people he portrays are constantly associated with typographic signs that stand as a bar code, turning them into products part of a capitalistic system.

The series of photographs on armoured glass show us that the artistic and cultural dogmas are perpetually put into question by different techniques and modern concepts.