Thomas Devaux
b. 1980
Lives and works in Paris, France
Thomas Devaux is a photographer, painter and sculptor and the creator of several complex series where both founding values and current developments in photography come into play.
His work frequently juxtaposes themes of the sacred and the profane.
The photographs in his Totems series are striking. Straight, slender, as hypnotic as they are reflective, they radiate a particular aura that absorbs body and mind and arouses an irrepressible desire. Contemplation is devastating, bewitching, retinal; it exploits the structure of fantasy and libidinal impulses. Yet this obscure object of desire traps the mechanisms of our fascination with the surfaces and simulacra of late capitalism. Closer to object than photography, the work diverts the fetishism of merchandise in favour of a new totemism.
With his Totems series, Thomas Devaux continues and radicalizes his criticism of marketing strategies by further investing the tenuous link that is established between various expressions of transcendence today. In the series Rayons, which began in 2016, the subject and the photographic process meet in an indistinguishable title. The "rayons" evoke both supermarket stalls and the optical technique used to chromatically expand the light beams.
Similar to abstract expressionist paintings, his images photographically construct their object according to a surface frontality reduced to an opaque, even narcissistic reflection. His photographs turn the focus on oneself according to a consummate perception that has become an end in itself. The spectacle of our own vision—erected as a target—is then consumed, like the faces absent from the Shoppers series. Presented as counterpoints, the individuals captured while passing through the crate emerge in a spectral way from a foggy black and white composition that dramatizes the signs of consumption based on captivating attention with shimmering and racketing tones.
The works generate their own light, they diffuse their energy through a halo effect that transfigures the profane for the sake of a moment of communion. Taken on dichroic glass, the photographs in the Totems series follow a vertical and miroic composition that integrates the viewer's body by melting it into the colour. The physical and formal confrontation with the viewer reveals a hidden part: that of the magical primitivism that crystallizes the totem form. If Walter Benjamin denounced the end of the aura and the loss of cultural value in favour of the exhibition value and the development of industrial reproduction techniques, Thomas Devaux managed, by a strange paradox, to recover the cult and the notion of sacred precisely thanks to the technical device and the rules defined by marketing. If trading in things is the social bond par excellence, advertising is a symbolism, in other words, the means of making the link. The photographic protocol produces the aura by maintaining a codified, regulated, millimetric aesthetic, like a horizon of negotiation of shared values. The case is meticulous and perilous, it is below any moral stance and beyond any commercial or religious connivance. It aims to reunite technical and spiritual intentions through the incarnation and material projection of the feelings, beliefs and desires of the audience into a totem object. The latter therefore provide a construction of the sacred, not so much of the goods, but of the Vision that originated the act.
- Marion Zilio, Art Critic (AICA) and independent curator (CEA)
AWARDS
2014
Winner, SFW Artist’s Award
2011
Winner, BOURSE DU TALENT #46 organised by Photographie.com, in partnership with L'Express, Nikon, La BNF et Picto
Nominee, Prix Art Contemporain by ARTE
Nominee, Coup de coeur Photo by L'Express Style
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2022
PhotoFair, September 2022, Shanghai, China
Solo Show, Seoul, Korea
2021
Unseen, Galerie Cedric Bacqueville Lille, Pays-Bas, Amsterdam, France
Paris Design Week, Galerie Bertrand Grimont, Paris, France
Art Paris, Grand Palais Ephémère Paris, France (Galerie Cedric Bacqueville Lille, Pays-Bas J8)
Approche, Galerie Bertrand Grimont, Paris, France
2020
Centre Photographique de Clermont Ferrand, France, Biennale de la Photo Nicephore
Art Paris, Galerie Cédric Bacqueville, Grand Palais Paris, France
2019
Luxembourg Art Week, Macadam Gallery, Luxembourg
Solo Show, Musée Charles Péguy, Orléans, France
Solo Show, Macadam Gallery, Brussels
Solo Show, Galerie Cédric Bacqueville, Lille, France
Solo Show, Galerie Bertrand Grimont, Paris, France
2018
Art Paris, Galerie Cédric Bacqueville, Grand Palais Paris, France
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2022
Group Show, Art Rotterdam, Holland, France (Galerie Cedric Bacqueville Lille, Pays-Bas)
Group Show, New York, NY
Group Show, Taipei, Taiwan
2021
Paradis Artificiels, Galerie Bacqueville, Paris, France
Divines, Macadam Gallery, Bruxelles
Group Show, Luxembourg Art Week, Macadam Gallery, Luxembourg
Group Show, Taipei, Taiwan
Nuit Blanche Mayenne, Le Kiosque, Centre D'art Contemporain
Duo Show, Macadam Gallery, Brussels, Belgian
2020
Group Show, Galerie Bertrand Grimont, Paris, France
Faux-Semblants, Galerie Bacqueville, Galerie Bacqueville
2019
Immaterialite, Espace Topographie de l'Art, Paris, France (Galerie Bertrand Grimont)
2018
Group Show, International Interior Design Exhibition, Macadam Gallery, Brussels, Belgium