PEROPERO (The White Show)
GALLERY HOURS | Tue.–Sat. 11:00–19:00 (Sat. 13:00–14:00 CLOSED)
CLOSED | Sun-Mon., National Holidays
* Temporarily Closed | Sept 18 to 20
Akio Nagasawa Gallery Ginza is pleased to present PEROPERO (The White Show), a solo exhibition by Thomas Mailaender.
Born in Marseille, France, Mailaender currently lives and works between Paris and Marseille. While widely recognized as a photographer, he also works across a broad range of media including ceramics and collage, and cultivates a distinctive practice as both collector and archivist.
He pursues his own form of “appropriationism,” collecting, classifying, and reinterpreting photographs unearthed from old publications or flea markets, which he then reconstructs through montage, drawing on prints, or combining them with various objects.
This exhibition unveils works derived from an unusual archive gathered in Serbia—a collection of postcard-sized photographs (10 × 15 cm), rephotographed from magazines and television programs. Mailaender presents large silkscreen prints made from this material, each entirely covered with a layer of invisible white security ink. The images remain hidden until activated by the intervention of the viewer.
The title PEROPERO comes from a Japanese onomatopoeia evoking the act of licking. A companion artist’s book, PEROPERO, is published in parallel with the exhibition. Like the prints, the book conceals its images under layers of invisible security ink, commonly used in the production of banknotes and confidential documents. The images are only revealed upon contact with liquid. Mailaender describes both the exhibition and the book as objects that are “activated, handled, and revealed only through (transgressive) acts.”
The exhibition also features a series of ceramic facsimiles representing boxes of photosensitive paper distributed from the 1950s to the 2000s. These are produced using an early photographic transfer technique onto enamel, developed at the dawn of photography by A. Lafon de Camarsac, who presented the method to the Académie des sciences in 1855. The image is applied to a ceramic surface and fired at very high temperature, becoming embedded in vitrified enamel. The enamels are said to be eternal: resistant to light, humidity, and oxidation. Particularly used in funerary art, the process is still employed today for portrait medallions on memorial plaques.
Once transposed into ceramic by the artist, these objects—originally designed to hold photosensitive paper—emphasize the tension between the inherent fragility of photographic materials and the permanence of images.
We warmly invite you to experience this new body of original works created especially for the exhibition and accompanying artist’s book.
Artist
Thomas MAILAENDER
トーマス・マイレンダー
Thomas Mailaender is born in 1979 in Marseille, he lives and works between Marseille and Paris. He is generally recognized as a photographer although in reality he employs a wide range of media including ceramic, cyanotype and collage. He is both a collector and archivist and as an insatiable enthusiast of the image, practices his own form of “appropriationism” in both digital and analog fields. He surfs the Internet fishing for “pearls” and digs up photos from the press of yesteryear, from old publications and bric-a-brac sales, which he stores, classifies and digests, before regurgitating them using montage, drawing on prints, playing with their register, enlarging them or associating them with various objects. He has assembled a vast collection —“The Fun Archaeology”—a kind of archaeological study of the worst of the contemporary world, whose documents highlight the vernacular richness of their language and their accidental poetry. Thomas Mailaender’s entire oeuvre ponders the question of taste, finding answers on the cutting edge of kitsch, amateurism and vulgarity, taking in both the comic and the sentimental.
Amongst his most recent and large-scale solo exhibitions is Les Belles Images, held in 2024 at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) in Paris. He also enjoyed his first retrospective in a European museum with The Fun Archive at the NRWForum in Düsseldorf in 2017. His works have featured in exhibitions held by important art institutions and in international shows, such as the MoMA in San Francisco (“Don’t! Photography” and “Art of Mistakes” organized by Clément Chéroux), the Saatchi Gallery and the Tate Modern in London, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and the Rencontres d’Arles. He has published a number of art books and was awarded a residency by LVMH Métiers d’Art. He has also curated several exhibitions including “Hara Kiri” (Rencontres d’Arles, 2016) and “Photo Pleasure Palace” with Erik Kessels (Unseen, Amsterdam, 2017).