Thomas Paquet (b. 1979, French-Canadian artist; lives and works in France)

Midi Solaire (2018–2021)
Empreinte(s) (2020)

Thomas Paquet makes light and time — the fundamental ingredients of photography — the subjects of his works. In two major installations, Paquet records the movement of the sun across the sky, making visible the passage of time. Midi Solaire (2018–2021) is composed of twelve unique cyanotype photograms (each 200 × 54 cm). Using a gnomon — one of the earliest astronomical instruments, a simple rod casting a shadow, that has been used for centuries to measure the sun’s trajectory — Paquet exposes photosensitive paper to the midday sun. Repeated once a month over the course of a year, this precise protocol produces twelve distinct solar traces. Empreinte(s) (2020), a previously unexhibited series of 365 prints (each 13 × 18 cm), extends this investigation over a year. Each work records the passage of the sun through a complete day, creating a daily archive of light in motion. Beneath the apparent abstraction of these works lies a sustained observation of the world through the shifting of light and the rhythm of the seasons.

Select institutional solo exhibitions include Cité internationale des arts, Paris (2023); Centre culturel Le Moulin de la Filature, Le Blanc (2019); and Festival L’Image Satellite, Vence (2019). Select group exhibitions include Fondazione Valentino Garavani e Giancarlo Giammetti, Rome (2025); Musée Albert-Kahn, Boulogne-Billancourt (2025); Le Point du Jour, Cherbourg (2024); and the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris (2023). His works are held in collections including Fondazione Valentino Garavani e Giancarlo Giammetti, Musée français de la photographie and the BNF.

Bigaignon is a Paris-based contemporary art gallery. The line of the gallery finds its roots in the avant-garde movements of minimalism, conceptual art, light & space, abstract art, and in the fields of experimental & conceptual photography for which it has been playing a leading role for almost 10 years. Profoundly engaged in the promotion of artists who work the fundamental elements of light, space and time, whatever the medium they use, the gallery is contributing to the rise of a new avant-garde. As such, with a strong international focus, the gallery defends and promotes the unique vision of artists it represents or supports, whether they be emerging, mid career or established worldwide, in their quest to propose a new visual vocabulary, to foster a radical approach to art, to challenge their own medium and to explore the full extent of its possibilities.