14/01/2002
by Elisa Fulco

Thierry Fontaine is among the young artists to look out for. He was born in 1969 in the French island of La Réunion, in the Indian Ocean, where he still lives and works, and in 2000 he became internationally acclaimed through his participation in the collective Fotoarbeiten at the Kunst-Werke in Berlin and by exhibiting in the annual Special Projects Program of the P.S.1 in New York. The 15^th of December saw the closing of his first British one man show at the new f a projects gallery in London.

Thierry Fontaine captured collectors’ attention with his large photographic self-portraits in which he is featured covered in mud, clay or chalk. By continuously masking or redefining his own identity using materials taken from the places that also act as backgrounds to his photographs, he expresses the ability to adapt to the most diverse contexts: from his own island to a city like Paris or Rome, where he lived in 2000 as a scholarship holder of the Academy of France. Identity moulded by nature and culture is the actual subject of his research, suspended between the uniformity of globalization and the heightening of individuality as the most extreme form of resistance to homologation.

"Creating sculptures and showing landscapes", as Fontane himself says, is the object of his art. Sculpture is the title that the artist gave to his most well-known photographic series, while each image that makes it up is identified by a number and by the name of the place in which they were shot. The prices of the c-type prints exhibited in London, printed in editions of six, depend on the series. For the prints taken in La Réunion between 1998 and 1999 the prices range between $ 3.900 (€ 4.350) for Sculpture 7 (140 x 100 cm) and $ 4.120 (€ 4.600) for Sculpture 3 (146 x 106 cm), and $ 4.470 (€ 5.300) for Sculpture 9 (165 x 125 cm), while the photographs taken in Rome in 2000, like Sculpture 10 (190 x 125 cm) and Sculpture 15 (190 x 125 cm), cost $ 5.280 (€ 5.890).

Gallerist Salvatore Ala (of the Salvatore+Caroline Ala gallery, Milan) explains that "the prices of the works by Fontaine vary according to their size, that range between 105 x 105 cm of Sculpture 34 to 190 x 125 cm of Sculpture 15", on which the London quotes are also based. "As regards the market for Fontaine, so far his photographs have been mainly bought by private collectors, but we are also promoting him to museums" says Salvatore Ala. The hypothesis that Fontaine may soon become part of prestigious public collections must not be excluded: one of his works is in fact already in the collection of the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian-Centro de Arte Moderno in Lisbon.