THOMAS PAQUET • MEANWHILE THE SUN ROLLS AROUND

Just like photography is simply about writing with light, Thomas Paquet's new series entitled "Meanwhile the sun rolls around" is reduced to its purest expression: to capture the imprints left by our star, the sun, on photosensitive paper. With his usual handcrafted approach, the French artist uses light and works the matter to create a delicate work, both random and perfectly mastered.

By using the pinhole, a traditional optical device, Thomas Paquet gets rid of the superfluous. The camera is here limited to a simple hole through which the light passes. Over the hours, marked on its surface by the luminous flux, the photographic emulsion records the movement of the sun in the sky. Like the gesture the calligrapher would make with his brush, the dynamics of the cosmos allows the birth of a line, a form of writing.

The light that insoles the paper first makes the form appear, but the light cannot be the only element in the production of Thomas’s works. The choice of the number of holes for each of his pinhole boxes, the orientation of these boxes under the celestial vault, and then the manipulation, in the darkroom, of aged, oxidized chemistries, allow the artist to create a syntax, a language that extends into a range of tonalities in a palette of reds, ochres, beiges, violets, sometimes desaturated tones up to black and white. Day after day, renewed through the gaze, his gestures are prolonged on the photographic emulsion.

Hypnotic, contemplative, these imprints offer us the appearance of a sequence of tenuous arcs, lines with imperfect contours. This inscription of a flaw gives rise to a meditative idea of the passage of time.

The permanent repetition of cycles confronted with the instability of the succession of moments is at the heart of this series. Confronted to various scales, the gaze is lost in front of these luminous scores. The moment is suspended in reverie, leaving the reflection floating before these textures, both delicate and constant, and makes the whole tilt into fragility. 

One can guess in this destitution the joy of seizing the sensitive and the pleasure of apprehending the poetry of our universe in movement.