A Rock is a River by Maya Rochat

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Texts by Simon Baker, Paola Paleari, Ingrid Luquet-Gad, Markovian System (Joël Vacheron & Aris Xanthos), Viviane Morey, Ann-Christin Bertrand and Brad Feuerhelm.

SPBH Editions is pleased to present A Rock is a River, a new book by Swiss artist Maya Rochat. Binding the alchemy of photography with the physicality of painting, Rochat creates organic patterns, chromatic alterations and visual ruptures that generate a slow, ongoing process of images mutating, reflecting a world in permanent flux. In the long tradition of artists’ books as artworks in their own right, Rochat understands the space of a publication as site-specific, and has conceived a series of works for the form of the publication, taking into account the possibilities of layout and printing experimentation. Drawing from the past two years of her photographic production, she revisits and interweaves images in various scales and rhythms to create an ongoing, unfolding collage in book form. 

A Rock is a River takes its name from the collection of raw material Rochat gathered to create the book. Much of it was shot in Valle Verzasca, in the Locarno district of her native Switzerland, as well as within other landscapes she has a direct connection to such as Peru, where her father lives. Inspired by the altering states of matter transforming in the natural world – the sculpting forces of continually moving water, rocks transformed by rivers, solids turning to liquids and back again – Rochat works layers of transformation into each her own works, in her own process of sedimentation. 

This is Rochat’s most ambitious book so far, both in terms of scale and physicality. Her photographs are given space to be seen in singularity, and her paintings engage directly with the pages they are placed on. A second layer of visuals born from organic gestures and surfaces overlap the base images, both digitally and manually arranged. Sections of the book are printed in colour and black and white on silver paper, creating physical ruptures each time it flashes when reflecting surrounding light.