0499-01, 0699-03, 0500-01, 1099-03, les rencontres, les étreintes, les luttes, les chutes, 0799-04, 0201-02, 0400-02, 0800-03

Eight digital prints mounted on Dibond
400 x 130 cm

Hervé Thoby draws his images from everyday life. He photographs his loved ones, dancers, hands holding a snail, a little girl in her bath, or even a bouquet of flowers. Eight images are assembled to form a panel measuring 400×130 cm. Their juxtaposition creates a flow between shapes and colors. Each photograph is titled with a number corresponding to the month and year the photo was taken, as well as the number of the roll of film used that month.

“I would like the images to evoke a floating world of suspended fragments, to give form to emptiness and sensuality; for viewers to detect in them a desire to heighten the urge to see reality, to preserve its most immediate trace possible. To express the inner nature of this world, somewhere between the archetypal and the singular. To seek evidence of our ways of being here and now through individuals or groups whose mode of existence is based on singular ways of life. The assemblages are first and foremost an expanse, the primal form of existence. These sequences, which at the outset are like fields of possibilities, gradually achieve a movement that satisfies me when it eludes me, when it transcends the mere question of formal resonances to find its own form, its substance, its rhythm, like a refrain. “That is why I like to draw a comparison with the way children play the harmonica: beyond the often binary rhythm—equally divided between inhalation and exhalation—they unwittingly give it a kind of breath.”

Hervé Thoby, A Few Observations on My Work.