Thomas Lélu (b. 1976, Séclin) lives and works in Paris, France. Multiplying collaborations with critics, artists, and filmmakers, Lélu is an artist and artistic director whose work stages a collision of words, images and concepts, puns, deceptive or humoristic slogans to parody ironically the canons of fashion photography and art history. Aware of the current saturation of images, he turns to photography by seizing images from fashion magazines, film icons, celebrities and models that he diverts with absurd objects, giving photography a new raw aesthetic, often trivial and intuitive.
His conceptual work of visual deconstruction of media stereotypes is driven by the search for a dynamic confrontation between text and image, the read and the seen. His statements on cardboard, a precarious material of waste, reactivate the ideals of protest and fusion between art and life when art takes to the street. With irony, he diverts these protesting attitudes that he parasites with slogans proper to our era, impregnating himself with everyday life and our individual and social behaviours.
