Thomas, tu n'as pas oublié la peinture, 1959, manques et plus sur illustrations, 45 x 54 cm

I first saw works by Thomas in an exhibition at the Le Carré gallery, in Lille, in 1998. They were two or three, small, framed works but had an intensity that belied their modest size. These works brought into focus qualities that I have come to associate, predominantly, with a kind of French artistic practice, most notably an attitude toward pictorial representation that factors in the 'thickness' of the surface as a prime characteristic of its status as tableau. The quality of this first encounter was one of both intrigue and curiosity. It has only recently occurred to me that a practice, such as Thomas's, is radical in terms of how it functions as 'composition' and within a framework of defiguration. The superimposition of discreet layers, in the works that I then encountered, announced depth through the piercing of the successive surfaces with holes and shapes. Composition is here not anti, auto or non-composition but a curious aggregation of the thickness of pictorial matter. Years later, and in the context of my own practice, I have come to think of this as a form of parataxis. As Ranci�ère says in 'The Future of the Image':
'The power of connecting is not that of the homogeneous - not that of using the horror story to speak to us of Nazism and the extermination. It is that of the heterogeneous, of the immediate clash between three solitudes: the solitude of the shot, that of the photograph, and that of words which speak of something else entirely in a quite different context. It is the clash of heterogeneous elements that provides a common measure.'
Thomas's work struck me in something like these terms (although I am certain I would not have articulated it in this way, at that moment, in Le Carré).
His use of collage brings into play the tableau form, not simply as a question of painting or a play with reprographic media, but rather as an interrogation of the relationship of such mediations that raise questions of 'image'. Such a question is perhaps about the materiality of the image; its composition as a distribution of its various components relayed within the picture surface. Surface here is a product of a series of actions which Thomas took great care to note in his meticulous archiving of his work. Arrachage, boules, brûlure, collé, déchirure, déchiré, découpé, manqué et plus, perforées, piqueté, piquetage, roleau, rondelles, superposition, troué acquire the identity of a pathology of forms derived from this palette of permutations and possibilities. In some works text and image combine, intertwined, across stratifications, the result of one, or several, of these manipulations, seismic, sometimes igneous events. The sense of such works is not the lisibility or decoding of the combinations the original material takes but is more a sense of how this material takes its place, as presence, within Thomas's pictorial regimes.