Thomas Mailaender is known as an exhibition maverick, a pirate of technique, a collector of oddities and a bandit on art’s highways. Here, he wears two hats: that of the hard-working artist and the foreman. He coats, sticks, cuts, glues, pulls, binds, projects, plunges, recycles, destroys and, in the same movement, exposes all these gestures. His studio in the middle of the Centre Photographique Marseille is like a factory running full time and at full speed. While museums have at least one day off, Mailaender and his team relentlessly work 24/7 in a joyful mess organized by the artist and named after photo stores in the prosperous 30 years after the war: Light Passion. Altogether, it feels like a carnival, the lab of a budding chemist or the busy garage of an amateur mechanic.

Guillaume Blanc