24, rue des Grands Augustins – 75006 Paris
01 71 97 69 57
www.galerie-insula.com

Thomas Jorion
Saudade
7-22 novembre

Thomas Jorion has been travelling the world, seizing the timeless incongruity of abandoned buildings. He makes these deserted spaces, where time seems to be frozen, come into the open. Derelict urban sites, abandoned factories, ancient Tuscan palaces, deserted American movie-theatres…. So many places of secrecy and loneliness the photographer has captured. As if to defy the inevitable oblivion.

“Saudade” is the story of both an unforeseen and intense encounter between Thomas Jorion’s artistic universe and this untranslatable feeling, this nostalgia of a happy past, real or transfigured, which constitutes the essence of the Portuguese soul.
The artist’s photographic chamber becomes a perfect and subtle echo chamber, with both a painful and delightful sense of abandonment that imbues the photographed sites. It is this melancholy born from absence that we can see floating in these sober and clean-cut pictures of these Portuguese villas and palaces. Their colorful decors, often baroque, were once the theatre of a well-off and carefree life which has disappeared today.
These first images, shot in Portugal, are the beginnings of an important series the artist plans on developing in resonance with his series on Italian palaces.

Thomas Jorion (born in 1976) lives and works in Paris. He uses a 4×5 large format camera and color negatives. He only works with natural light, without staging or editing.