Thomas Demand at Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto

Thomas Desire refers to the get the job done he’s most recognised for, pictures of lifetime-sizing paper products depicting familiar media images—such as the regulate middle of Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Ability Plant or the bathtub in which German politician Uwe Barschel died—as Hauptwege, or key roadways. But he’s also explored numerous Nebenwege, or facet alleys. By these forays he’s stretched his official and conceptual engagement with the product, dissolving borders among various media, actuality and fiction, the ephemeral and the long-lasting. Demand’s exhibition listed here, “House of Card”—created with artists Martin Boyce and Rirkrit Tiravanija, and the London- and Zurich-dependent architecture firm Caruso St John—puts forth many modes of collaboration, artmaking, and curation.

3 sets of massive Diasec photographic prints from Demand’s “Model Studies” series, 2011–20, depart from his usual solution: Rather than documenting his personal paper facsimiles, the artist presses his digital camera lens deep into the textures, folds, and hues of others’ constructions—building prototypes by architect John Lautner and the Japanese organization SANAA, and garment designs by couturier Azzedine Alaïa—to develop vivid formalist compositions. These abstract performs bring Demand from customers back to his early days as a painter. In other places, pictures of abstract compositions designed from fragments of white paper and cardboard models from SANAA hang on azure wallpaper—a substrate that is essentially an enlarged photographic composite of a sheet of paper—patterned with delicate creases and shadows.

Also on watch are Demand’s sculptures and analysis elements for his first architectural task, The Triple Folly, 2022, developed for the Kvadrat textile company’s headquarters in Denmark. Collaborating with Caruso St John, Need references the centrality of paper in the pavilion. Each of its a few joined buildings resemble a paper product: a folded piece of paper, a plate, and a soda jerk’s hat.

Installations by Boyce and Tiravanija lead to the exhibition’s dizzying reverberation of the genuine and its illustration. Made all through separate residencies in Japan, Demand’s huge photograph of his scale design of a karaoke bar threatened with demolition and Tiravanija’s operating replica of the very same place acquire a playful conversation. In fact, “House of Card” is a corridor of mirrors.

— Jill Glessing