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Thomas Cartron is a visual artist who lives and works in Rouen.

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« Thomas Cartron cultivate a plastic lexis, associating each photograph, each series, with a gesture executed either during shooting or during processing. Combined with a series, even a modest one, these movements transcend his work beyond a simple angle or shooting point. 
     To this end, he usually borrows a technique from a photographic archaism, by developing his photographs on seemingly poorly adapted materials. He creates installations in which he stages photographs he collected or his own, and even tinkers with the lenses and devices — an improvised DIY which contrasts with the technology he ordinarily uses. 
    The manipulated, sometimes unclear or invisible images revealed by Thomas Cartron seem to draw on the following questions : what remains of photography when images fade ? What becomes hidden as they are developed ? »

Alongside his practice as a visual artist, Thomas Cartron is also artistic director and curator for multidisciplinary projects, especially with Nos Années Sauvages collective. 

He regularly creates set designs for live performances and exhibitions. He also works on design, graphism and photography projects.

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Work in progress.

With the support of Drac Normandie, Région Normandie, 
Département de la Seine-Maritime, Musée Nicéphore Niepce 
and Les Ateliers Vortex.

« Thomas Cartron's images could be situated in a virtual space where representation appears and disappears, or in other words in a psychic space of representation where memory and oblivion meet and separate for a moment. Drawing on mythical tales as much as on the most concrete and current reality, the artist invites us to explore with him what is most mysterious in ourselves, what is unspeakable, inexhaustible and impossible, and which in its labyrinth loses us as much as it guides us. » {Extract from Pascal Bourjac’s text}

Exhibition at Repaire Urbain, Angers City Art Centre, 2022.

Project following a residency with Sylvain Wavrant, 
with the support of Ville d’Angers and Nos Années Sauvages. 

« Thomas Cartron's photography is not intoxicated by its apparent power to capture the world. It is a photography that distrusts itself and refuses to be a forger. Once and for all, the image of the thing does not have the power of the thing. So it's a question of finding the technical or aesthetic means to admit to being a photographer (...) And as we go through the exhibition, it seems to us that everything is new and that each object gains an unexpected interest. A slate quarry appears to be a lunar land. A lakeside landscape takes on an apocalyptic hue. Stone statues still seem to pulsate with an underlying life. Material reality takes on a mythological texture. Rock, skin, sky, steel. We are plunged back into an elemental world. Through the power of illusion and our impressions, we are once again ancient men. Chimera.. » {Extract from ‘The life of chimeras’ by Judith Ashby}

Exhibition at Lectoure Art and Photography Centre, 2020.

Project following a residency with Sylvain Wavrant, 
with the support of Centre d’art et de photographie de Lectoure, 
DRAC Occitanie as part of a residency « Capsule », 
and Nos Années Sauvages.

« Anima Obscura is a time, an artistic and reflective interlude, where two artists, in the context of a welcoming structure and territory, have risked their work to the extent of a myth grasped with finesse and awareness. Far from illustrating it, they went beyond it while remaining faithful to it, and managed to bring it up to date without using technological tricks. Anima Obscura is neither a plea for nature, nor a trial against humanity, but rather a kind of metaphorical instruction manual for using our world intelligently and poetically... » {Extract from ‘On the edge of the clearing’ by Manuel Pomar}

Exhibition at 10/12, Bruxelles, 2020.

Project following a residency with Julie Tocqueville,

« From these ‘uncontrollable’ sequences, risk emerges and, with it, inevitably, chance. Shapes appeared, spaces were created, symbioses and certain unstable balances - ready to enter abstraction - gave rise to other reflections. In a more informal way, the study of crystallisation has approached less formal spheres, where ideas serve as substances. » {Extract from Coline Franceschetto’s text}

Exhibition at  10/12, Brussels, 2019.

With the support of Ville de Bruxelles, Région Normandie, 
INSA Rouen and Ville de Rouen. 

« Thus, on an oversized image, we see the shapeless, as much a revelation as it is a disappearance. We see matter. We see a seized moment, not an image of the immeasurable universe that disappeared a million light years ago, but a constellation of sand and pistils, revealed by the crash of a sunbeam’s atoms on a simple sheet of paper on a summer’s day. » {Extract from Alexandre Mare‘s text « in the moment, in the midst, in the murk »}

Exhibition at Rouen Ceramics Museum, 2018.

Project following a research residency in Uzbekistan,
with the support of Région Normandie and DRAC Normandie. 

« The traditional motif of the flower used by Thomas Cartron, while belonging to a different history from those shown in the museum, is nonetheless reminiscent of the play of shapes and designs found on certain Western ceramics. It is easy to see that these works, discreetly scattered around the museum's display cases, evoke a kind of survival of the fittest. And that these works are discreet witnesses to a being that is also discreetly disappearing: the sea. » {Extract from the text ‘The motif, which emerges’ by Alexandre Mare}