Throughout his career, Wolfgang Tillmans has challenged the potentiality of making pictures and has brought a new kind of subjectivity to photography. On the occasion of his fourth solo exhibition at the Galerie Chantal Crousel, in Paris, the artist keeps exploring traditional genres such as portraiture, still life, or landscape with a constant interest in the limits of visibility by pairing intimacy and playfulness with social critique. Looking at his new series of photographs a gentle feeling of intimacy and voyeurism arise as, through his unique frame and vantage point, he seems inviting us to sneak into a series of private circumstances. Some are quiet and solitary, some others show a presumably conviviality, but all of them seem to be frozen in time.
The political significance, the political readability of surfaces is something I have been interested in from an early age — even if it is the surface of a torn pair of jeans, which leads us to questions of what we consider to be beautiful.
De-contextualized and re-assembled, they leave space for new meanings and personal interpretations.
Through the integration of genres, subjects, techniques, and exhibition strategies, Tillmans questions the existing values and hierarchies while expanding conventional ways of approaching photography and addressing the fundamental question of what it means to create pictures in an increasingly image- saturated world.
