CET OBSCUR OBJET DU DÉSIR: THOMAS DEVAUX

The project centers on three series : The Shoppers, Rayons and Dichroics. In them, the artist questions the new transcendences of the contemporary world.

The Shoppers-Rayons-Dichroics trilogy, presented under the borrowed title "Cet obscur objet du désir" (Luis Buñuel, 1977), has something operatic about it. The forms and arrangements, the materials used, seem to construct the story of an immense blindness that would be the allegory of our unreasonable passion for consumption. Thus, functioning like a surveillance camera, Shoppers is a work of distant photography, capturing the consumer's gesture of exchange as he pays for his purchases or wanders around under the weight of his shopping bags. With almost zombified attitudes, the shopper is visually treated as a figure bled dry, anonymous and yet singular. The Rayons, or rays, for their part, are the result of blowing up consumer products until they lose all recognizable form and their format, their colour and the blur generated, in a play of analogies, produce a sort of large abstract painting. Blinding again: sacrificing the sharpness serves as a way of capturing the attention. Paradoxically, faced with an abstract work inviting contemplation, the spectator no longer sees, in the true sense of the word, the merchandise that subjugates him. Finally, Dichroics unfurls, through the choice of the eponymous glass which allows a double luminous operation (the light crosses the glass but also reflects on it), the image of the product that is enlarged and almost invisible to the extent that it reflects the spectator: the latter is not only fascinated, but also caught in the image of the surrounding things and of himself, subjected to the variations of lights that constantly renew the colored gleam of the glass. Blinded in front of this mirror that the artist has taken care to gild with gold leaf on its frame, the spectator is caught in front of this modern Golden Calf, with, often, as the only reflex, to take a selfie in front of what the artist calls the "totems". Because ultimately this is what it is all about, in this symbolical exchange of sacred beauty and profane beauty: the image. 

Thomas Devaux's "black box" is a kind of oratory, a place of devotion to the emblem of consumerist desires. The spectator appears as a dazzled penitent in the midst of a secularised trinity. Further on, the fury of "Black Friday" echoes a choreography of collective hysteria: what the visitor to the "black box" must atone for.

 Extract of a text by Michel Poivert, photography historian

The exhibition design spatializes the meditative and spiritual tonality of the work with an installation in the center of the gallery’s monumental nave. 

Born in 1980, Devaux lives and works in Paris, France. He exhibits widely in major international fairs, exhibitions, and museums, with recent events at the Centre Pompidou, la Maison Européen de la Photographie and the Louis Vuitton boutique in Paris, among many others. His work is held in major public and private collections such as the BNF.