THOMAS PAQUET • OH LIGHT!

EXHIBITION FROM 3 APRIL - 31 MAY 2025
OPENING: THURSDAY 3 APRIL 2025 (6-9PM)

We are thrilled to present Thomas Paquet’s new solo exhibition entitled “Oh Light!”, starting at the gallery on 3 April 2025. The exhibition delves into the essence of light, uncovering its intricate nuances through a series of experiments in which the artist reimagines traditional darkroom techniques.

Thomas Paquet’s “Oh Light!” heralds a vision of luminosity with an exclamation point echoing Virginia Woolf’s likewise punctuated gasp more than a century ago: “Oh to be a painter!” Facing canvases at the National Portrait Gallery, Woolf’s shudder of artistic comprehension, coupled with an envious recognition of a medium’s power, permeates Paquet’s project here. With an almost childlike joy, Paquet playfully deconstructs photographic techniques, returns to its essential elements, in order to celebrate a single component: “The most important element is light.

Immersing viewers in prismatic color, foregrounding the rich texture of his supports, Paquet’s photographic production approaches the painterly. En plein air, or, for this exhibition, in the traditional darkroom, Paquet crafts each unique work directly as a positive image. Forgoing the negative through a measured protocol, Paquet revels in the hand made, the possibility of the tools of his trade, embracing accident and the humanity of mistakes. Assembled here for the first time, his complete De la Chambre noire series frames, into bright rectangles, circles and triangles, the varying effects of distance and materials on color and saturation. These works translate light. Building blocks, if you will, for the humble act of paying attention.

In a letter to a fellow painter, Paul Cézanne once advised: “treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone ... nature for us men is more depth than surface, whence the need to introduce into our light vibrations, represented by the reds and yellows, a sufficient amount of blueness to give the feel of air.” The modern painter’s perception of landscapes as simple three-dimensional forms shifting inside real space foreshadowed Cubism and abstraction as well as the pulsing spaces of modern photography and the moving image. In his translation of the landscape of light through elementary forms, Paquet recalls Cézanne’s vision. The brilliant aureoles of Paquet’s Vignettage works, for example, radiate from his fluid gesture of shining light round prepared cylinders. “Writing with light,” he says. Using the space of the studio to project a vision of the universe, Paquet’s large Gradient works shimmer like the sky above Cézanne’s Mount Saint Victoire. “I am fascinated by what brings us closer to the cosmos,” Paquet tells me, “to the stars.”

Lillian Davies