Thomas DEVAUX

"We are indeed in an illusion here: the illusion of a painting when it is actually a photograph, the illusion of abstraction when it is actually a blurred object, and the illusion of the sacred when we are actually talking about supermarket items."

Born in 1990, Thomas Devaux currently lives and works in Paris.

With a highly contemporary aesthetic approach, his work revolves around several media - photography, painting and installations. Though he defines himself as a "visual photographer". His photographs, which seem like oils on canvas, question the boundaries of the visible, and set sacred and profane spheres in tension. 

His artistic practice creates a subtle dialogue between spiritual aesthetics and the most trivial forms of reality. In his most important series, The Shoppers and Rayons, Thomas Devaux takes his inspiration from ordinary supermarket imagery. Far from a direct representation of objects or consumers, he focuses on "what lies between the two": desire.

His works, often blurred, with velvety textures, allow the artist to work with light as a material in itself, recalling Rothko's canvases in their luminous density and meditative dimension. Through his minimal treatment, he plays with reality and transcends it. For his  Dichroics series, he incorporates dichroic glass, an optical material that changes color depending on the viewing angle. A technology derived from  aerospace research, this material has a high reflectivity index. The viewer becomes an integral part of the work, reflected in its surface, immersed in a play of reflections and transparencies.

By reconfiguring familiar images, the artist subverts the codes of consumerism to reveal their invisible zones: those where the gaze, desire and light all combine to weave a new contemporary liturgy.