Une plain, white cardboard box. Inside, more than a thousand photographs of car accidents. On prints like we no longer make, glossy or matte in the classic amateur format, the steel carcasses appear crushed, folded on the side of a road. Nothing artistic, a priori, in this torrent of crumpled metal sheets. Thomas Mailaender bought the lot from a collector, who had taken care to burn those depicting human beings. “I would have preferred to get the set and see the people,” he said, looking mechanically at the pile. “I immediately thought of the philosopher Paul Virilio [décédé en 2018, NDLR], what he wrote about speed and accidents. »
These images will be present at the European House of Photography (MEP), inserted in long panels behind glass. Standing in his hangar workshop in Marseille, Mailaender supervises the finishing touches to the works intended for the exhibition, a carte blanche ironically named “Les Belles Images” which will occupy 800 square meters of the Parisian institution.
Talking about a retrospective for a forty-year-old seems ill-advised; it is rather a progress report for this artist previously shown at the Tate Modern in London, at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, at the Rencontres d’Arles… But whether it is déjà vu or creation for this great occasion, the artist displays the same line: the absurd, the incongruous, the surreal serve as a compass in his research and […] Read more
