Elsa HOUGUE

« Thomas Müller : Rhizome »
Galerie Catherine Issert, Saint-Paul-de-Vence
April 26th – June 7 th, 2025
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English version: Jill HARRY

Thomas Müller pursues a form of artistic expression making no concessions: he is exclusively committed to drawing, and acknowledges its autonomy. Yet with limited means of expression – in terms of the medium itself, formats, colours -, he breathes life into a visual form of “grammar” which is totally free and vivacious. The work of Thomas Müller functions rather like the template of cell growth; it literally colonizes the space. It can be read, deciphered, proposes a pathway to be pursued by the gaze, inviting the viewer to follow the structuring of shapes achieved through repetition, variation, harmony and tension. After presenting his work on several occasions in group exhibitions since 2022, the Galerie Catherine Issert is devoting a one-man show to the artist for the first time: his chance to reveal the full potential of his work, whose powerfulness resides in its multiplicity and visual impact.

“Do not be one or many, be multifarious! Compose the line, never adding a full-stop!
Speed transforms the full-stop into a line!” (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille plateaux, 1980)

Drawing is everywhere. Children draw, we scrawl, sketch, in many circumstances in our daily lives. Painting is a field reserved for the painter, whereas drawing belongs to everyone. In keeping with this statment, both gratifying and emancipating, Thomas Müller has developed an art form based on a radical bias: since the mid-1990’s, he has made drawing his sole means of expression.

For him, each drawing is a world in itself, with its own climate. Some are clear and uncluttered, composed of just a few shaky strokes of chalk; others are chaotic, stormy, saturated by dark tangles, shuddering clouds. Others could even be aquatic: rejecting the freehand approach, the artist uses a ballpoint pen, assisted by a piece of broken glass acting as a line ruler, to trace imposing, calm forms, sculptural waves, born of a simple variation on the stroke. Faced by rich touches of ink, oil or acrylic, we also guess that he has adopted something of the intensity of painting, which he pursued in the 1980’s and up to the mid-1990’s. Dryness responds to humidity, fat to slim, fullness to emptiness: each piece says something about, and to, the one following or preceding it.

A language comes into being, recalling that the artist studied literature at the same time as the fine arts. Just like linguistics, his work is based on relationships with constraints, prerequisites: verbal expression, a field of freedom, certainly requires syntax. Thomas Müller thus evolves with a reduced number of formats – three at the most -, and A4 in particular, evoking the page that the writer will use. These small format pieces, like units of meaning, will literally grow on the walls to create visual formulations. Before becoming an area of emancipation, color is also a framework. The artist adopts a limited color range, never combining two shades in a single piece, and making himself accept color as it is presented to him, going as far as to use it directly from the tube.

Thomas Müller looks for resonance, connections – we notice powerful complementary associations between orange and blue, green and violet -, sometimes discordance, contradictions, giving rise to rhythm. Vectors of vitality, lines and colors are one and the same, opening up fields of forcefulness in each drawing and the entire space. The artist’s work is to be read rather than observed. One’s gaze roams around these alignments creating fullness and emptiness, almost suggesting installation. Captivated, it advances; destabilized, it takes cross paths. It finds it hard to stop, caught up in this network of resemblances and dissimilarities, where it enjoys capturing neighboring connections and familiarities. The artist’s hand is constantly engaged in an action and reaction system, and the same is true for our eyes: the work is the ideal stage for mobility.
Thomas Müller only uses the vertical format; more abstract, it avoids, in his opinion, any reference to a landscape. Yet a certain connection to nature remains. Fractals, microscopic views, geological strata: images come to mind. Thomas Müller’s drawing seems to make perfect but invisible forms of nature visible, to reveal an internal principle of order for which he will serve as interpreter. He thus adheres to the Renaissance tradition of the disegno while adding a physical dimension: the body is indisputably involved. Any connection to abstraction then seems ambiguous: does the distinction between figurative and abstract have any relevance here? Remarkably, when recalling those who have caught his eye, the artist mentions first and foremost Joseph Beuys and Louise Bourgeois.

Patient, determined, Thomas Müller cultivates a certain art of slowness while being ready to seize in mid-air the momentous form that his hand will release on the paper. He draws every day, like certain writers who keep notebooks – such as Paul Valéry, whom he admires – to give shape to fragmentary poetry. Resolved, tenacious, fervent, he proposes an art form whose modest means are at the service of emotional magnitude.

Thomas Müller lives and works in Stuttgart. Born in 1959 in Frankfurt am Main, he graduated in 1988 from the Fine Arts Academy of Stuttgart, a city in which he also pursued studies in German language and literature in parallel, at the university, from 1980 to 1983. In 1991 and 1992, he won a scholarship for the Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg, then another for La Cité des Arts in Paris. His work has been presented in group exhibitions and one-man shows in numerous museums, art-galleries and art centres in Europe and the USA. In particular, he has worked with the Kunstmuseum Bonn, the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, the Chasa Jaura Museum in Valchava, the Kunstmuseum of Stuttgart, and the Centre d’Arts Plastiques in Royan. His works form part of prestigious collections, such as those of the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the Hamburger Kunsthalle, the National Museums of Berlin, the Florence and Daniel Guerlain collection, and the Kolumba Museum in Cologne. In 2024, Thomas Müller was awarded the Kubus-Sparda Art Prize by the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart