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24 February – 23 March 2023Vernissage: Thursday 23 February 5 – 8 PM4 rue des Minimes, 75003 ParisGalerie Marguo is pleased to present Memoranda, a selection of photographs drawn from the archives of the Franco-German artist Thomas Block Humery. On view from 24 February to 23 March 2023, this body of work stems from the artist's decade-long cathedral project 'The Great American Vernacular Encyclopedia', in which the exploration of the American territory by the artist becomes both an ordinary and transcendent experience. Memoranda, the artist's first exhibition with the gallery, also marks the first public exhibition of this great body of work.
Under the eye of his brother Matthieu Humery, curator of exhibitions, hundreds of images were reviewed in order to propose a rereading of Thomas’ series, a true creation in its own right. For Matthieu Humery, the literary and poetic dimension of Thomas' work, which ultimately writes with images, makes his photographs difficult to classify. For Memoranda the two brothers made a selection of about twenty images, chosen for their strong chromatic charge and the wide range of realities they embody. This selection of works is intended to highlight one of the artist's essential concerns: bring the photographic image to a more mental terrain.
Artist: Thomas Block Humery -
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It looks like a road trip but it is not.It looks like a journey but this journey is not necessarily what you expect it to be.— Thomas Block Humery
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Related Publications
'The Great American Vernacular Encyclopedia' series by Thomas Block Humery -
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Thomas Block Humery
The Desert Light, 2023Inkjet on canvas with artist frame
Triptych
Each: 125 x 100 cm (49 1/4 x 39 3/8 in)
Each: 127.4 x 102.4 cm x 3.3 cm (framed)
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I see reality as a potentiality. From the chaotic information that is territory, I isolate what I perceive as beauty or as a sign. I then approach the real until it becomes mental.— Thomas Block Humery
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Thomas Block Humery
Zabriskie Point, 2023Inkjet on canvas with artist frame
100 x 125 cm (39 3/8 x 49 1/4 in)
102.4 x 127.4 x 3.3 cm (framed) -
Beyond a simple aesthetic game, these photographs give the impression of a certain evanescence. Where are they from? What are they? What do they represent?
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Moments or spaces slip between the images whose 'message' seems to be truncated to leave more room for the receiver who becomes the narrator. As the narrator of his own perception, he will be able to let emerge a non-verbal consciousness where images have replaced words. From one sign to another, it is a mental journey that the spectator is expecting; a spectator capable of animating the off-camera of the visible.— Thomas Block Humery
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And for the American territory, Thomas uses it for a disproportionate face-to-face encounter where the road has more initiatory virtues than anything else. Travelling all these roads, crossing all these cities and countryside, it seems to me that it is more the reality that he questions in a country in perpetual mutation and competed by the myth, giving him an infinite ground of exploration.— Matthieu Humery, exhibition curator
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Where ‘The Great American Vernicular Encyclopedia’ could suggest a meticulous classification of local American specificities, it is paradoxically a study of emptiness that the artist proposes. Cream caps like skittles on a motel table, watermelon improbably lost in the middle of a street, New York cups, it is these small details considered insignificant that the artist stops on.— Thomas Block Humery
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Thomas Block Humery
Tower in Tulsa, 2023Inkjet on canvas with artist frame
125 x 100 cm (49 1/4 x 39 3/8 in)
127.4 x 102.4 x 3.3 cm (framed)
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Self portrait of Thomas Block Humery. Courtesy of the artist.
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