Thomas Mailaender
Decalcomania

Exhibition Details

Decalcomania celebrates the history of images, yet it doesn’t show any. From the invention of photography between 1820 and 1840 to the release of the latest iPhone, our modernity is also the story of how we take photographs. In Decalcomania, the focus is not on the final product – the image – but on the mechanisms, materials, and supports that make it possible.

Thomas Mailaender looks at a niche of amateurs where technique is king: a new camera, a new lens, or a new flash are objects of a fetishistic, masculine fascination that comes before and after taking pictures. It is technique for technique, a sublimation that often goes without the purchase of a product: its representation can be enough. Catalogues and magazines are mines of information, traces of material culture and its evolution.

Decalcomania is a tunnel of nostalgia. It is a dive into the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, a booming era for the represented brands, and for stickers as a form of communication. It is a hymn to amateurism and photomania, to pop and to vernacular: we are in a tunnel greenhouse – an example of poor and popular architecture – surrounded by stickers, emblems of the image as decoration, reproducible and accessible to all. It is a hymn to collecting, not only as a subject, but also as an artistic practice: for Mailaender, fetching material on the Internet – images, as well as old objects – “is like looking for mushrooms in a forest,” somewhere between sport and methodology.

In the end, infinite mental images exist within each sticker, generated by the viewer’s personal memories or imagination.