Laurent Millet — À propos — Slash Paris

Using photography, scultpture, drawing as well as video, Laurent Millet creates series of images that can be seen as different chapters of an imaginary encyclopedia. Landscape, architecture, objects, occupy a central place in his work. Though, its main purpose is to study and play with the interactions between these elements and the way they question images or the way images are questioned by them.

Millet’s installations oscillate between references from art history (Calder, Miro, De Stijl, Flavin, Serra…), vernacular shapes and childish games. They are questioning the visual dimension of things, but also how these shapes and representations travel through space and time.

In the recent series Last Days of Emmanuel Kant, or Please Hold the line, Millet’s images reveal in the deceptions and revelations of sculptural form. But rather than emphasizing the material weight of his constructions, the dominant effect is of light and color intervening in the specific spaces of their construction.

More recently, the works Crazannes and Deconstruction link surprisingly the notion of transparence in architecture through landscapes of abandonned quarries, imaginary architecture glass models and a renaissance technique of hunt.

Millet’s constructions are hardly the effects of a naïve dabbler, but rather make knowing and winking reference to a wide-range of Modernist art and scientific discoveries. From Tatlin’s Constructivist reliefs to molecular models: against this matrix of signs, Millet’s work evinces a critical doubt and wonders at our ability to understand and perceive the world around us in any objective fashion.