Büro, 1995.

Thomas Demand, along with other artists like Filip Dujardin, Dionisio González, Philipp Schaerer, or Beate Gütschow, is the contemporary expression, no longer of the disciplinary state of architectural photography – which for theoretical purposes we can consider amortized or surpassed – but of the only plausible outlet there is for representing objects and architectural spaces, making us reflect on existing limits from a perceptive and especially conceptual angle, halfway between built reality and its representation. Pondering a depreciated, distorted architectural image – devalued by the dulling of its omnipresence, which makes it hard to assimilate sensibly and judiciously – Demand deliberately dispenses with the real to enter the three-dimensional space of the fictional, the sphere where the alienated viewer can feel reconciled with the visual experience of architecture. Faced with an almost repudiated objectivity, Thomas Demand deconstructs it by means of an assemblage of his own simulated narratives. His images look as real as they look unstable and dreamlike. The extreme material and chromatic perfection of the material reconstruction ultimately produces the opposite effect, revealing the montage. These beautifully disturbing images take on meaning when loaded with the history they refer to...[+]