PARIS.- Thomas Jorion's latest work is a series of Monolithes, concrete blocks on which the artist prints views of industrial cities. The 1976-born French artist, known for creating singular, timeless landscapes in natural light, has learned to make concrete casts which, due to the iron support inside, drip rust onto often damaged edges. This brutal material responds to the vision of great cities in ruins, and also recalls the artist's beginnings, when he traveled the world to eternalize colonial buildings, once chic and noble but now abandoned and returned to nature, or this construction of a nuclear power plant that was never completed and left to decay today.
Thomas Jorion, French photographer born in 1976, lives and works in Paris. Self-taught man and great traveller, he takes his images with a 4x5” large format camera. For more than fifteen years, his work has been developed around a contemplative aesthetic of solitary and timeless spaces. He develops a singular architectural language that questions the passage of time and the mark that man leaves on Earth.
In 2013, the publisher La Martinière published Silcncio, a book that brings together several of his series : Silcncio, L’auĚrc A"áriquc, Konbini, La quâĚc dcs sovicĚs... From 2013 to 2016, Thomas Jorion focused his photographic exploration on the former French colonies. A new series, Vestiges d’empire, gave rise to a second book published by La Martinière in the autumn of 2016 and presented during his participation in Paris Photo.
Since then, Thomas Jorion has taken up and developed the series of Italian villas and palaces. This project, entitled VcduĚa, is based on the pictorial representation of urban landscapes using the perspective offered by the ca"cra obscura. On the occasion of the 500th anniversary of the Renaissance, the Centre des Monuments Nationaux is exhibiting the series in various monuments, including the Abbaye de Cluny. The project will then be presented in solo and group exhibitions in Paris and Italy.
With his latest series No Man’s Ti"c, the photographer Thomas Jorion adds a chapter to a remarkable body of work. This work on ruins invites us to question ourselves in front of the sublime of places whose history can only be read in their erosion and abandonment. Devoured by the surrounding nature, the palaces, cinemas and factories are "c"cnĚo "ori that offer us a journey in which several time frames are linked. The ruin becomes the centre of a broader reflection on our relationship with our environment and our common history.
In parallel with this new series, Thomas Jorion has undertaken a work of photography on concrete. The sculpture is an opportunity for the artist to capture a form in space and to give body to his favourite material : concrete. The monoliths explore various aspects of this material, notably that of recording photographic images.
