PTÔSES

EN. There is magic in Thomas Cap de Ville’s work: in time travel, but also in the vivid resurrection and reassembly of the scattered fragments of memory. Above all, there is method—an obsession with fulfilling the wish to make peace with the past. Thomas Cap de Ville’s work consists of a series of 12 books (produced between 2015 and 2025) that together form the artist’s memoirs. Beneath layers of tape, photographs, Polaroids, drawings, objects, hair, teeth, dried flowers, and confessional texts lie fragments of his life from ages 18 to 33, collected, preserved, and offered. The people who appear alongside him throughout the pages are the partners of a mythologized adolescence, where identity is alternately violated and repaired. The powerful desire to belong embraces, day after day, the desire to leave—within a meticulously organized chaos, a great moment of transformation. From the young adult (Book 1) to the child (Book 12), the fragmented chronology operates like memory itself, in flashes and sudden illuminations. The different formats invite different modes of perception and handling—physical engagement is essential here. One must dive in. The project is titled PTÔSES, from the Ancient Greek ptosis, meaning “fall.” In medicine, the term refers to the descent of an organ. Here, the movement is one of discharge, a visual eruption. And if we are physically implicated in what Thomas Cap de Ville tells through his books, it is because this work belongs more to impulse than to reason or fiction. Ultimately, there is prayer in Thomas Cap de Ville’s work—a prayer with therapeutic power, whole and unbroken, that exorcises fears and resurrects the dead. Magic and organs, body and heart. Like a kind of funerary rite of mummification, the final bands of tape come to heal the past, to preserve the ghosts. They create a barrier to keep them from returning. Through this mirror, we can see them—but we can see ourselves as well. A pact, a promise: it is still there, but it is over. – Elisa Rigoulet, January 2026