Thomas Mailaender at the MEP, an Art of the Unusual

Thomas Mailaender is a photographer, but to confine him to this discipline would be limiting. An art collector and collector of unusual objects, the artist’s work is currently being shown in a retrospective titled “Les Belles Images” at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie until September 29th.

An Art of Staging

Thomas Mailaender’s carte blanche opens with the work “Extrem Tourism,” a series of photographs of a volcanic eruption. Mailaender has superimposed his face onto each of these striking photos. Welcome to the artist’s world! Opposite hangs the series “Sponsoring,” composed of genuine photos from photography award ceremonies. The ritual is always the same: forced smiles, tight framing, and disproportionately large checks. Using photomontage again, Mailaender has inserted himself into these photos, portraying himself as an eternal winner. He turns his name into a humorous character within his photographic work.

The Passion for Beautiful Images

“Les Belles Images,” the eponymous title of the exhibition, is a series of photographs from press agencies, often used in news dispatches. For the artist, “these images are part of the great moments of our little history.” Without captions, they are set in frames made by Mailaender and his assistants.

The Passion for Conservation

Thomas Mailaender is a collector of unusual objects and images, as evidenced by his cabinet of curiosities. The photographs reflect our times and become archaeological objects. The internet is also a great source of virtual images that he has gathered according to common themes: dangerous parents, photographers photographed in strange situations, signage errors, etc. These absurd photos taken by unknown individuals, filled with humor, could have ended up in the depths of the internet but will instead be featured in photo books.

Mailaender has also shown interest in other collectors, such as a former insurance expert who kept photographs of crashed cars encountered during his career. Mailaender juxtaposed several hundred of these, creating a hard-to-look-at piece.

Photographing allows one to preserve a trace of reality, to bear witness to an era, and to laugh about it, and nearly all the rooms in the exhibition lend themselves to this. In this carte blanche at the MEP, Thomas Mailaender has chosen to present works by other artists: “I have always liked specialists. I spend a lot of time looking for people who have unique practices and who have ‘no’ resonance with art history. I like to recognize them to fully interpret their methods and approaches” (Thomas Mailaender in Foam Magazine, April 2011).

He thus discovered Pricasso, an Australian painter who films himself painting portraits using his penis as a brush. Or Rosemary Jacobs, who, through her photographic project, testifies to argyria, a disease that turns the skin of the face gray. Throughout her life, this American woman campaigned against the use of silver nitrate, responsible for her condition, in medications.

If photography and other mediums used in the exhibition are part of a conservation effort, nearly everything on display is destined to disappear. One of the last works, “Bookworm,” is a reminder of this. Thomas Mailaender placed one of his books, with only 13 published copies, in a glass box filled with woodworms, thus inscribing the book in a forthcoming destruction.

You leave the exhibition with a multitude of questions. Why is it so important to collect vernacular objects and display them? Are photographs taken for utilitarian purposes art?

This exhibition allows us to discover artistic practices on the margins of art history, some of which are used by a single artist. Mailaender is interested in the materiality of art: internet images become tangible objects. For an hour and a half, you dive into a universe unique to the artist, taking you far, very far away.