collecting

hiding

researching

The idea of latency is decisive because its meaning induces the idea of a floating, an expectation, an imprecision that must be seized. This idea applies to two gestures: collecting and letting it evolve.

The collection is carried out most often in the street, always from the ground. The collection can also be photographic, gathering images of details, materials, scraps. These rejects draw their sculptural qualities from their hazardous presence and their certain abandonment. The materials are recovered and amassed. They are both witnesses and proofs of the existence of people who become perceptible only by the presence of what they leave behind. There is this idea of something that does not appear, or at least only faintly by the presence of a remnant, of a trace. Scraps are linked to a vague and latent temporality.

The second gesture, "to let evolve", is linked to latency. The works often have no finality. The temporality is extended, the space-time is not fixed. This vacancy of the forms is related to a vacancy of the ideas. A research can be both open and turned on itself, allowing to think the research as much as its objects. A search can be both open and turned on itself, allowing to think the search as much as its objects. The collected objects are linked to tenuous and floating temporalities, as much in their past as in their future uses.

There is also the attraction for what disappears, what is subtracted, hidden. It can also be what does not appear, what will no longer appear. Dissimulation sometimes intervenes as the stage that prolongs the temporality of a form and the gestures linked to it. Some works are enclosed in materials such as concrete, secret inscriptions are buried underground.

But why dissimulating ? The meaning of this action remains unclear, also hidden from a perception that is resigned to leaving it vacant. It is this vacancy that allows it to be always exploitable, because what has no recorded finality remains open to research.

The term research is important. It is a constant and open dialogue between practice and theory, between gestures and words that intermingle and feed off each other.

It is a latent dialogue.

The city is important. It provides thoughts, tools and materials. They are extracted from it, drawn from a constantly evolving urban apprehension.

It is a latent dialogue.

Thomas Maestro graduated from ESADHAR Rouen-Le Havre, France. Through the observation and collection of what he calls "surfaces" (elements that are most often scraps), he develops a work of sculpture, installation, research, and attempts to create secrets.