Guaranteed chills in the dimly lit basement of the Palais de Tokyo, transformed by Laura Lamiel. Magnificent in its play of reflections and simultaneously terrifying, the artist's first installation will leave no one unmoved: a vast expanse of pristine white, studded with a precariously placed metal chair, gleams brilliantly, dazzling us. Upon closer inspection, we discover it is littered with knives, scissors, penholders, blades, screws, and other blunt objects, as well as scattered or perfectly aligned nitrous oxide canisters. A sense of unease...
The shimmering light from neon tubes ricochets off shattered glass scattered across a mirrored floor, simulating infinite space, and is echoed by the glint of cutting tools. Beauty and danger are intimately intertwined here. Beyond seduction, fear lies in wait, like the tottering chair, isolated at the center of the installation, which could well be the condemned man's… or perhaps our own, whose reflection we glimpse on the other side, in the mirror facing us?
GHOSTS
Taken to its extreme here, the interplay of materials is at the heart of Laura Lamiel's entire dramatic approach, the foundation of her aesthetic. This is evidenced by the title of this installation, Honey on a Knife, borrowed from a Tibetan monk's definition of sexuality…
In La Mue and La Mue 2, the artist explores the same contrasting sensations of softness and pain by suspending cotton coats and iron-mesh shirts facing each other, resembling shadows or ghosts; unless they are our inner demons…
Materializing the presence of absent bodies, coats, like gloves, are recurring motifs in Laura Lamiel's work.
In the “cells,” they evoke both imprisonment and inaccessibility. There too, in these impenetrable spaces, “intimate territories 1” enclosed by transparent or opaque glass walls, or mirrors (with or without a one-way mirror), opposites coexist. All the tools and materials of the artist’s world are arranged there with obsessive care, mixing everyday objects with those from the study or studio: lamps, clothes, books, puppets, suitcases, copper wire, glass, steel, leather, cotton…
From coldness to sensuality, chance encounters are dazzling.
View of the exhibition “Coimbra Biennial of Contemporary Art”, 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Marcelle Alix, Paris / Photo: Jorge das Neves
INTIMATE TERRITORIES
A metaphor for saturation and alienation, the work Dans les plis leads us into other " psychic spaces 2 ": In the aisles of a vast metal shelf, the artist has amassed 300 kg of methodically pleated white linens. Interspersed with fluorescent tubes and scraps of fabric bearing the inscription " Nothing needs to be done, everything needs to be undone The work sounds like a grim, or rather, cynical warning. For the artist, in fact, “women have always been constrained […] laundry is part of these constraints. This laundry, these compressions, is a metaphor for a condition in whichNothing needs to be done, everything needs to be undone2. Installation-sculpture, like the large display of books tinted with red ink – having lost following this long and meticulous recovery process […] their book-like character to become “simple” red parallelepipeds 3 " –, this "compression" resembling a great rampart also reveals the purely formal beauty of the prolific and protean work of the artist who came from minimal art.
1 Anne Tronche, La Pensée du chat, ed. Actes Sud / Le Crestet Art Center, Arles, 2000
2 Yoann Gourmel, curator of the exhibition
3 Laura Lamiel, interview with Yoann Gourmel, Artist's Studio, Paris, March 2023
"LAURA LAMIEL – CAN YOU HEAR THEM?"
PALAIS DE TOKYO 13, AVENUE DU PRÉSIDENT-WILSON, PARIS 16TH
UNTIL SEPTEMBER 10, 2023
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