Thomas Bernardet

Thomas Bernardet files his photographic images under two categories: ‘Documents de travail’ [working documents] of “variable sizes, uses and types of visibility”, and ‘Documents travaillés’ [worked documents] defined as “collages of photographic images and various media”. On the one hand, then, a collection of images taken and regularly replenished by the artist; on the other, the same images, associated with or applied on different colored and textured papers, to produce a series of unstable compositions. Considered individually, the photographs can seem banal, extracted from the most common, ordinary reality, with a recurrence of graphic signs and interplay of lines and textures. However, the offhand way they are treated, combined and presented endows them with a strangeness that tends toward abstraction. Through his interest in the conditions in which single images are shown to the viewer, Thomas Bernardet questions not only status of these images as documents, but also their potential to stand out and become works of art.