“Thanatos” (2015-2019)

In Thanatos, Anthony Mirial descends into the nocturnal realm of the soul, where bodies come undone, split, and drift toward a threshold that only the image can hold. The series unfolds as a silent dialogue with classical painting: fragments of angels, veils, vanitas… so many echoes layered onto a photograph to reveal a liminal zone where temporalities collapse. Here, the body encounters pictorial memory, allowing itself to be invaded, crossed, erased.

Black and white becomes a spiritual matter. It does not illuminate; it reveals the strata of the visible, apparitions, specters, traces of the sacred that Mirial has pursued since his beginnings. Each image seems to arise from an interrupted breath, a fragile pulse between presence and disappearance. Faces dissolve, bodies waver, as if the photograph was capturing the final vibration before collapse.

Thanatos is not a celebration of death, but an exploration of its intimate territory where our fears, our desires, and the obscure zone we all carry within unfold. A visual meditation on finitude, on what persists after the fall: shadow, the soul suspended.

Through these blurred figures, these superimpositions and erasures, Anthony Mirial questions what the image can still preserve, or lose, of our inner metamorphoses. A journey at the edge of the visible, where death is no longer an event, but a presence that whispers.