Thierry Genay
France
Photographer after a career as a graphic designer in the textile industry, Thierry Genay implements in his creations his expertise in composition, and his fascination for the material.
The choice of the photographic medium was made by culture, by taste, in accordance with a particular interest in Dutch painting of the seventeenth century, whether it is the pictorial material of the large ochre and gray backgrounds of still lifes or the rigorous construction of interior scenes.
Photographer heir to a painting that, in the absence of noble and sublime motifs, feeds on a perception of everyday life, Thierry Genay’s photographic compositions are part of this constantly renewed history of still life.
A still life mirroring lifestyles, of a daily reality that is thus illustrated, humanist or spiritual, of a reflection on the harmony of nature, but always echo of the intimate.
A cabinet of curiosities composed of simple, natural or manufactured objects. Objects that lose their quality of use to become form and material thus integrating that of the background. Modest objects that value each other to the point where, their values becoming equal, they merge into a composition that slides towards abstraction.
It is a job where you subtract rather than add. It is a question of orchestrating precisely a silence, the expression of a seemingly quiet balance between forms and materials, between full and empty, between what would be seen and what is not seen.
Thierry Genay is based in Toulouse, his work is presented in Europe and the USA.