French contemporary and visual artist originally trained in architecture, Thomas Garnier is a graduate of Le Fresnoy, Studio National des Arts Contemporains, where he received the ADAGP “Révélations Art Numériques” special prize for his “Cénotaphe” installation. His practice is that of an artist, but also of a researcher or heterotopologist, as defined by Foucault in his text “Les espaces autres”. This research into “liminal” space, or the “in-between”, leads him to produce collapsing automated sculptures, infinite animated images that loop back on themselves, chimeras and linguistic accumulations of non-existent artistic movements.

In this way, he seeks out singular and distant places, material and immaterial motifs that influence the structure of space, of our anthropocenic landscapes. The critical nature of the works is developed through wandering, and the observation of real spaces. In Thomas Garnier’s work, we seem to be witnessing the archaeology of a world modeled on our own, derived and adrift, caught between and obsessed by the congregation of multiple temporalities and techniques, derived from a non-existent futuro-primitivism, a feverish supra-romanticism, an overwhelming multi-brutalism.

Chimera, 2024

Chimera is an installation made up of a set of bars that randomly generate associations of prefixes and movements, political, artistic, economic and religious trends every minute. Each bar can operate individually or in a programmed swarm. The combinatorial richness generates an infinite number of existing, absurd, inventive, dark, anachronistic and utopian proposals.

Chimera questions the structural and temporal composition of language, and the way it conditions the reading and partitioning of history, particularly artistic history. Chimera aims to be a tool for opening up the creation of new movements and future thought, but it is also, conversely, a critical tool tending towards a form of “exhaustion” of the possible by recycling existing or past forms in an accelerated fashion.