Thomas Devaux is a photographic artist whose work encompasses several complex series exploring both the foundational values and contemporary evolutions of photography.
His photographic practice, often bordering on painting and drawing, allows him to pursue a continuous investigation into themes of the sacred, the profane, and transcendence; motifs already present in his earliest works.
In his series Attrition, Devaux questions the nature of photography itself. Its indexical value is not denied: each image originates from a direct shot. Yet, from the outset, the photograph is conceived as a fragment destined for future recomposition. His process begins with simple snapshots of events, such as exhibition openings that he then treats as raw material. Through what might be called a “ruderal plasticity,” he creates new forms out of remnants. These are mixed and transformed to the extreme, giving rise to unreal figures, unsettling divinities beings that populate his own mythology.
Following Attrition, the artist developed a new body of work entitled The Shoppers / Rayons, comprising a series of photographs and an installation that, while closer to reality, remains suffused with an aura of grace. These portraits depict an ordinary, mixed crowd captured at the checkout of a supermarket heads bowed, eyes often vacant, photographed only at the precise moment they pay what they owe. This humble image of consumers at the act of payment is then decontextualized, stripped of its everyday setting through Devaux’s characteristic black-and-white treatment, and elevated once again to the status of a modern icon.
Cet Obscur Objet du Désir emerges as a visual fable through which the viewer becomes aware of their own act of consumption and self-consumption.