Signed; Thomas Sauvin - Kensuke Koike - No More No Less - 2018

Singed by Kensuke Koike

In 2015, the French artist Thomas Sauvin acquired an album created in the early 1980s by a photography student at a university in Shanghai. This exercise notebook brings together original negatives, silver gelatin prints, and handwritten comments by an anonymous teacher, revealing the student's diligent efforts to master the conventions of traditional portrait photography. Fate granted the album a new life when it came into the hands of Kensuke Koike, a Japanese artist based in Venice whose practice combines collage and found photography.

It was from the meeting between Koike and Sauvin that the series No More, No Less was born. The project consists of new silver gelatin prints made from the album's original negatives. These prints are then subjected to Koike's incisive imagination, as he deconstructs and reinvents the images using nothing more than a blade and a roll of adhesive tape. Yet these entirely manual interventions all adhere to a single formal rule: nothing is removed, nothing is added, "No More, No Less." Within this framework of freedom and constraint, Koike and Sauvin meticulously explore the possibilities of an image that is composed solely of itself.

Limited edition of 400 numbered copies.