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LAURENT MONTARON
Born Verneuil-sur-Avre (France), 1972. Lives in Paris
Je n’ai de cesse, 2000
Colour photograph, 107 x 160 cm
Courtesy of the Schleicher+Lange Gallery, Paris
Melancholia, 2004
Modified Roland RE-201 echo-box, neon, painting
Courtesy of the Schleicher+Lange Gallery, Paris
Capillarity 2006
Film (16mm) transferred to DVD, 6.16
(produced for the exhibition)
Courtesy of the Schleicher+Lange Gallery, Paris
Glass architecture, in its origins in the 19th century, was intimately linked with commerce and science - in the shop windows of stores in the narrow Parisian streets of the 19th century capital described by Walter Benjamin, and the display cases of museums with their synthetic, positivist representations of the history of evolution, such as those which figure in the photographs of Laurent Montaron. “Photographed in the Natural History Museum in Nantes (France), Je n’ai de cesse presents a strange face-to-face encounter between a young woman contemplating a display case, and an Inca mummy. Crouching down to view the exhibit better, the woman is surprised to see her own face reflected in that of the mummy. The framing of the image places the figures in a perspective which coincides with the story of evolution, even more so as the display in the cabinet represents man as a species which has descended from primates. The title of the work, taking up an answer formulated by Félix Guattari as to what might define evolution, implies a notion of being which is in a state of flux, projected in time” (Marie Cozette and Laurent Montaron, in the catalogue Laurent Montaron, edited by The Gallery, Noisy-le-Sec, 2006).
Melancholia is a machine whose enigmatic operation has been made visible. It consists of a metal strip continually running through an echo-box such as those used with early electric guitars. The echo-box appears to capture an incoming signal and immediately change it into a kind of reading, without actually recording it. Separated from its guitar, the echo-box becomes deaf and mute, and the incoming ‘signal’ filtered and deformed in an infinite silence. In this way it becomes a conceit: the entrance and exit of the strip reduces the passage of time to an eternal present, without memory or future.
The film Capillarity shows in slow motion a man spitting into his own hand, then sucking up his saliva again. The blue light which surrounds him, clouding our view, comes from the kind of artificial lighting used in certain public places to prevent the injection of drugs, as this kind of lighting makes veins difficult to see. The experience of ingesting his own secretion refers back to something archaic - primitive, infantile, regressive - and breaks a taboo - that of contact with the inside of one’s own body. The title, which evokes a process of infiltration by impregnation, refers to contamination and the discovery of the virus.
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