PARIS Tadzio

Maison européenne de la photographie / 6 avril - 5 juin 2016 Mais au-delà de la virtuosité technique, l’exercice a sans doute ses limites. L’avenir nous dira si ce travail, au demeurant parfaitement maîtrisé, peut encore évoluer sans se répéter. Une publication, introduite par un texte de Daniel Abadie, parvient à rendre compte, par sa qualité d’impression, de la finesse de ce travail (Éd. Regard). If this show were not held in a museum dedicated to photography, we might be fooled by the images and think they were abstract paintings. Since some of them flirt with monochrome, we can be sure that Tadzio’s references to painting are not accidental. This is clear in the large format series Architectures. At first we are impressed by their presence and sense of composition. Then, looking more closely, the shades of black are stunning. The result is somewhat paradoxical, because what strikes us about these pieces is the distancing generated by their coldness and angularity. We have to get beyond the dark masses (which turn out to be parts of buildings) to appreciate, at first, the quality of the grey, sometimes almost bluish backgrounds, and then discover the fine shades of black that appear in these truncated geometrical forms made of interrupted triangles, sliced rectangles and tipped-over trapezoids. These forms occupy a determinant place in the composition and structure it, even though we can’t identify them—which, after all, is not the photographer’s intention here. Tadzio’s work clearly marks him as a photographer, even if he also practices video. He obviously has a sharp eye that allows him to capture and homogenize a substantial ensemble of architectural details, shot in Tokyo and Shanghai, Limoges and Nantes, London and Basel. But there are limits to this kind of exercise, despite his technical virtuosity. The future will tell if this work, so strikingly controlled, can evolve without self-repetition. The catalogue, with an introductory text by Daniel Abadie, is extremely well printed and consequently a faithful report on the subtlety of Tadzio’s work.

Translation, L-S Torgoff