Galerie Frédéric Lacroix
January 8 - February 26, 2011
Thomas explores the body, outside and inside. Outside, they are portraits, faces or silhouettes as in the series of « carrier ». Inside, they're fragments, pipes, bowels. The viscera does not evoke the suffering of the flesh, but rather reinterprets boards and casts of a cabinet of curiosities. Succession of the series of drawings, charcoal or gouache, wax, plasters, wood, ceramic, with always correspondences between the different materials. Each material calls a technique and a particular form, and give rise to series that respond to each other. The sculptures as the woven yarn drawings result from an architected construction. The constrained material, the balance of sculpted forms imposes the elaboration of a skeleton that maintains the whole.Thomas builds his work on a body scale. The whiteness of the biomorphic forms in ceramic exudes a sensuality and projects us through the voids and the fulls, the curvilinear tubes and the protrusions.
Ceramic, 62 x 53 x 51 cm, 2010.
Vertical equilibrium or horizontal ground rise, the sculptures appear to be the result of a mathematical construction, such as the elements of a gear. The canals evoke fluid flows flowing through the body. Yet the « Eye-traps » also reveal defensive points, such as a visual trap. To this carved bowels responds a grey paint : a tangle of two siamese bodies emerges from the raw canvas. Silhouettes seems nested in a molecular construction.
Thread gouache and pencil on paper, 42 x 30 cm, 2011. (Click to enlarge the images)
The charcoal on pink paper declines a universe of envelope, pocket and matrix. The tint of the paper evokes the flesh on which the protective membranes float, a combinatorial game of the different possible of the same shape that turns inflates or retracts. Some drawings lets guess objects both playful and sexual, spinning tops or Bilboquet. On drawings of enigmatic faces, perforations appear such as the pores of the skin, connecting the outside and inside : they are a breath, a crossing of the body. We are invited to cross the face surface, And recompose a mental image of the inner part of the skull, to live in it. The red wires on a white drawing or white on a red drawing, pierces the paper, and punctuating the drawings. These threads are sometimes free and in motion, as floating in an aquatic universe, or sometimes fixed to the paper such as circuits or anatomical boards, reminiscent of the drawings of skinned.
Valérie Labayle