TOKYO-2017 Fine Art / Collage
Echoes of Outer Voices and Subtle Clues
“He was just dreaming about a normal life, but his fate gave him a Fabulous Opera…”
Birdy Tg is a French Visual Artist and Writer (novelist, philosophical essayist, poet).
He is, in every aspect, a storyteller.
“Echoes of Outer Voices and Subtle Clues” is the result of 4 years of constant work on a very large Photography serie and Literature saga about the extraordinary life of Derek Rose. This is now also an art book.
Derek Rose was born in tragic conditions in Cambodia during the Civil War and the terrible Khmer Rouge Army abuses that made about 2 millions of victims into the Cambodian population. His mysterious and inconvenient birth origins led him to an immediate death sentence by the Khmer Rouge leaders. For a while he was saved, hidden and brought up by a poor rural family until all the family members paid this insubordination of their own life. Traumatized, the young child was exfiltrated by a French NGO but became amnesic. Unfortunately, in France, for some reasons, his birth origins had to be kept a State secret. So, all of his past was definitively erased and a brand new identity given when he was entrusted to the orphanage where he grew up into a definitive deep spleen leading him right to insanity.
This is the long way of a complete reconstruction that Derek will then have to undertake for his life. From a total loss of identification and civil decline, a homeless life and an everyday danger, Derek will be saved by the infallible friendship of a young fellow who patiently helped and gave him back the taste for life. Throughout an extraordinary destiny and a lot of twists in the drama, Derek will bravely learn every key aspect of life, fighting against all pretences to find the difficult answers to his existentialist questions. Finally succeeding in becoming a famous international photographer and founding his own family, he is still far to imagine how much life could be unpredictable…
This is a narrative and conceptual, philosophical, allegorical and oneiric, romantic epic around the world but more than anything, an initiative journey in dreams and real life through hell, purgatory and paradise.
Through each of his photographs, Birdy Tg questioned the founds and the great mysteries of our human life: birth, existence, death, friendship, love, good and evil, religion, time and space but also justice, politic, history, society, consciousness and unconsciousness, psychology and science, and the fundamental place of arts into life.
Birdy Tg uses photography as a painter does with pigments and brushes on large format collage frescoes including several thousands of individual photographs and requiring up to 2500 work hours on a single work.
He searches to find again the splendor of the detail, the keen eye for it, the exuberance of keys that made the great days of Classical Painting, but in a very contemporary expression, using and pushing the latest technologies to date to new limits.
There are of course in Birdy Tg’s work many different layers of lecture from the first global aesthetic level up to the most hermetic one. The numerous details serve the underlying philosophical problematic Birdy Tg submits to the viewer and invite him to enter deeper into the artwork for a true treasure hunt of clues and evidences, symbols and artistic references for taking his own stand on it.
Birdy Tg is a storyteller. Even if his main skill is large collages made of thousands of individual photographs, as a pure photographer he also loves working on direct architecture photographs that take place into his storytelling. From the triumphant darkness points out the grace of a divine light as many hopes still offered to the characters of his philo/psychological stories. More than a typical architectonic view, his photographer’s eyes focus on the deep feeling reflected by the material walls into the space, just like emotions could inside the head of a victim of our contemporary world.
