Artists

Thomas Cap de Ville

Press release

Galerie Lars Friedrich is pleased to present ‘shrugs’, Thomas Cap de Ville’s first solo exhibition in Germany.

TCdV works in book form, handcrafting volumes that vary widely in form and scale, into which he binds photographs, drawings and other archive items from his youth. The anarchic compositions, at glance, offer precise kaleidoscopic reflections on this transformative period, all tied up by conservation materials that hint in themselves at the ephemeral.

Each of the 12 unique books that make up the Psycosphore series which started in 2017, capture specific fragments of an adolescence spent in provincial France during the 90s, then in Paris in the early 00s. In retrospect they become reliquaries for a fleeting past life lived on the edge. These ‘vessels for carrying the psyche’ are inhabited by intimate fetish objects and images that TCdV reworks into ever new arrangements.

Throughout this narrative, we encounter figures that are born in the blur between the realms of memory and fiction. They spread out of the books onto Xerox drawings that undergo added layers of interventions and pixelization.

Exhibition proposal by Joseph Bourgois.