Maria Tomé — La Main de Dieu — Addict Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 23 → July 27, 2013

Maria Tomé is an artist who works with images. She creates stories in order to extract the staging of the situations. More interested in guiding our gaze than in emphasizing the narrative, her work highlights the object’s unconscious. She decides to “reveal” rather than to create, drawing us into her alternative vision of everyday life. Using luck and accidents, her work submits to fate and it tries to tame it at the same time.

She was born in the South of Portugal, closed to Africa. Her mother, who was a dressmaker and her father, who was a carver, taught her how to cut. When she was 20 and attracted by light and color, Maria Tomé worked on photography. She became James Lignier’s assistant. This artist, specialized in still life representations, gave her a F3 Nikon, her first camera. With this new tool, she traveled around the world for five years. She attended Louis Lumière School for some time and then she went back on the road.

Today, she uses her experiences, the different jobs she had in the cinema industry and in fashion, the people she met and the randomness of life to tell us stories. Besides the look, hearing has a central role in Maria Tomé’s art. Music has a great impact on her work and musicians, whom she meets during the concerts she takes pictures of, are central characters of her artistic approach.

In 1991, she met Jean Luc Blanc, Jean Luc Verna, Aurèle and the FFF in the FMR hospital. She called this place “my school of art” since she developed new artistic wishes. Then in 1995, she began to work with George Clinton, one the fathers of funk. She has created costumes for him since then. In 1998 she designed his clothing for the Grammy Awards. In the same way, she dresses the FFF for their concerts. With embroidered images, collages and printing on fabrics, her clothes express her imagination. Stage outfit has its own staging.

Maria Tomé now works on cuttings/collages and photographs in her workshop in Ile St Denis. She applies her strange and familiar approach to books, magazines and Art catalogs by illustrating some Human rules: Rien ne se perd (Nothing is lost), Trocs (barters), Tranferts de prisonniers (inmates transfers) and Switch Houses. In Switch Houses, Maria Tomé works on the clash of contrasts and differences of our world. She picked opposite books and she transfers elements and images from one to the other, following the pages. This process creates unpredictable meetings and confrontations, which will be exhibited as photo prints.