Jimmy Robert, the body, the memory

Jimmy Robert, a multidisciplinary artist born in Guadeloupe in 1975 and currently living between Paris and Berlin, has been working for over twenty years on the border between image and body, memory and form. His practice combines performance, photography, film and collage, with an abiding interest in the relationship between material, gesture and representation. Through the manipulation of photographic surfaces and sculptural structures, he explores the body as subject and object of the artistic act, often in relation to themes of identity, gender, race and belonging. He has exhibited in important European and American institutions, including Tate Britain and MoMA, and has held a solo exhibition touring several museums, establishing himself as one of the most original voices in contemporary art working on the intersection between visual and performative language. His new exhibition, entitled The Erotics of Passage, is on display at the Thomas Dane Gallery in London from 6 June to 2 August 2025. This is his second solo project with the gallery, but the first presented in the London venue. The exhibition brings together a series of recent works that investigate the relationship between photography and sculpture, between image and object, through a series of installations that use photographs printed, folded, draped and suspended on wooden structures built by the artist. The works, far from the traditional conception of photography as a flat and transparent surface, present themselves as three-dimensional, unstable and vulnerable presences. The structures, sometimes blackened or partially destroyed, amplify the sense of fragility and impermanence. The photographic images, often taken from personal or family archives, take on a spectral and delicate character, becoming fragments of memory suspended in time. A recurring element is the white shirt, with the open collar: an ambivalent symbol that can evoke discipline, disguise, elegance or everyday life, it is charged with changing meanings depending on the context in which it appears. This simple and neutral object becomes a device through which to explore the body and its representation. Along the exhibition path, we encounter texts written by Elvan Zabunyan, an art historian with whom Robert has collaborated, which accompany the works as a theoretical and poetic counterpoint, opening up reflections on memory as a performative gesture. The title of the exhibition is inspired by an essay by James S. Williams on Marguerite Duras, in which the act of remembering is described as a physical and imaginary process, crossed by desire, loss and transformation. With The Erotics of Passage, Jimmy Robert constructs a sensitive and stratified experience, where the image is never just what appears but also what is missing, bends, hides, undoes. In an era dominated by digital images and the incessant production of visual content, his research invites us to slow down, to linger on the material of the image and its ability to evoke fragile, intimate, collective presences.