Patrick Tosani French, b. 1954

Patrick Tosani studied architecture in Paris between 1973 and 1979, but from 1980 onward he distinguished himself from this field through a photographic practice based on scalar manipulations of manufactured objects removed from their context (spoons, heels, clothing, ice cubes, etc.). Over the years, his photographic subjects evolved from small to large: in 1982, he created close-ups of figurines embedded in ice cubes; in 1987, he exhibited a series of women's shoe heels, enlarged to two meters and displayed side by side; in 1988, the Geographies series dramatically magnified drum surfaces, transforming them into topographies resembling geographic maps.

While maintaining a methodical and conceptually inclined approach, Patrick Tosani developed an original body of work that broke away from the strict frameworks of Other Objectivity, a movement associated with artists such as Hannah Collins, Jean-Louis Garnell, and Jeff Wall. His research-based practice explores playful variations on the different states of the human body. Although he retains the “tableau form” emblematic of the Düsseldorf School, he primarily seeks to disrupt perception and emphasize experimentation. Deeply passionate about photographic technique, he describes his work simply as “a recording and then a testimony of an experiment.” Producing almost clinically rigorous images, he states: “I arrive, in a way, at an almost scientific, descriptive form of photography.” Perfectly sharp, frontal, and considerably enlarged, the photographed object becomes a tool for analyzing the photographic practice itself and its distanced relationship to reality.