Extremely sensitive to the efforts people exert cultivating their appearance, Thomas Geffrier takes an approach close to photojournalism all while constructing a very personal oeuvre as a portraitist. He captures his subject like a collector. He carefully observes the postures that the ego impresses on a silhouette, snapping quickly so as to preserve the spontaneity, the timidity, the trace of childhood, that bit of magic in the instant. He aims to capture truth in that so-brief moment when the body and face are still unconsciously and imperfectly expressing what they aspire to look like.
One: "One or five people in search of their personality."
Thomas Geffrier's passion is the individual that escaped from the greyness of daily life, and with this project questions the idea of the uniform. What remains once everything has been erased?
Five persons, men and women, of different ages and origins, identical and unique at the same time. With these portraits the artist refers to the increasing uniformization of our age and the globalized individual of the future.
While the impoverishment of identity does not seem to worry the sitters, their faces are both stern and open. Thomas Geffrier does not believe in the objective values – age, sex, etc. – and presents us a cool neutrality, which however is disarmed by the physiques of his models; it is impossible to restrain them. Sloping shoulders, enclosed necks, apparent strength or declared softness, each body speaks for itself and its integrity. The faces, ephemeral representations of various ethnic backgrounds and ages, become objects of desire as well as source of emotions in this play with photographic cloning.
Parallel to his work for magazines, music companies and advertising, Thomas Geffrier develops his personal body of work in the human being and its place in the Society.
http://www.thomasgeffrier.com