Thierry MaltyFra

Thierry Malty, photographer

Born in Montrichard in 1963, Thierry Malty spent his youth in Blois, studied at the Beaux-Arts in Orléans and then moved to Paris, where he has lived and worked for twenty-five years.

Passionate about art, he comes to photography on his own, learning how to shoot works of art on behalf of major Parisian dealers, gallery owners and international collectors.

The staging of studio photography, this form of fiction thanks to which the photographed work can be transposed into another work of a visual nature, constitutes for him a decisive apprenticeship. He immediately departs from photography of the real, that of the instant, of the instantaneous, in favor of a photographic narration inscribed on a longer moment and which he captures to do so at a slow speed. His technique is refined through experiments punctuated by accidents, in a process ultimately leading to a very personal identity. But that, once tamed the speed-light-matter equation, it reveals a new photographic art.

Works or objects that are a priori "inert", but thus animated, Thierry Malty then quite naturally turns to the photography of sets, whether in architecture, decoration or cooking. He places his objectives and his sensitivity at the service of many customers.

Among the photographer's inspirers, two painters for him are above everything: Francis Bacon or Pierre Bonnard, whose representations, to be figurative, nevertheless and masterfully freed themselves from all reality. Their mention in the mouth of Thierry Malty is no coincidence. As well as that of the American photographer Irving Penn, an absolute precursor in his eyes.

For about ten years (the first of his exhibitions dates back to 2009, at the Bailly gallery (quai Voltaire), in parallel with his activities for architects, actors of tourism, luxury brands, châteaux and grands crus or from his numerous publications, he delivers personal work which is now widely recognized.

From "Loup Ange" to "La Rupture", "le Baiser", "la Pieta", "Bodygraphy" as today with "Animal redemption", his series feature portraits of men and women, faces, torsos, legs, hands, semi-naked bodies, often those of duets of dancers and dancers in motion, and represented in images that free themselves from any need to adjust from a depth of field to any point of sharpness . Quite the contrary, since what he is looking for is an abstraction, that which the memory of movements imprints of its own accord on his photographic paintings, generally diptychs or triptychs of very large dimensions.

Photographer of “intermediation", as he defines himself, his “in-between" questions the very meaning of the relationship to reality which binds the photographer to his subject by imposing his capacity to transgress it. Photographer Duane Michels expresses it with these words: “No other art form reproduces reality so faithfully, but in my opinion, reality is reduced to mere appearances. So what about fear or physical desire and all the pressures we put on each other? ". In his own way, by making them dance in front of his lens, Thierry Malty digs nothing but these obscure objects of desire.