Patrick LAUMOND — Portfolio — Slash Paris

MetaHism. An attempt to expand the possible

Patrick Laumond’s work appears to derive from the plastic qualities and language of minimalism and conceptualism, born in reaction to the pictorial lyricism of expressionism. Rather than a profusion of colours and figurative and narrative tendencies, Laumond’s installations are a priori embodied in abstraction, but also in the rigour and the coolness of an immaculate white. The forms are geometric, the lines straight, regular and homogeneous. The tensions and obliques underline an operative dynamic, at once mathematical, structural, even universal. However, unlike the leading exponents of Minimalism, such as Malevich’s Suprematism or Mondrian’s Neoplasticism, Laumond expresses no desire to strip life of life, that is to say, the sensitive and subjective part of the world, in order to reveal a phantasmal essence.
Initiator of metaHism, whose prefix META denotes the Whole, ISM its own artistic trend and H, the eighth letter of the alphabet, an infinite movement symbolised by the lemniscate ∞, Laumond does not seek to formalise an art deprived of sentiment which would flirt, as was the case in the last century, with the totalitarian overtones and masculine values of modernity. Rather, in this almost tautological paradigm, we find the desire to inscribe an irresistible flaw, thus elevating contingency, accident and tilting to the rank of indispensable partners. The motif of the grid, driven by a supposed purity, neutrality and orderliness of things, will thus always be countered by a stain, drips or fractures. If Universal Concordance seems a distant evocation of the Minimalist vocabulary, with its pared-down forms, its monochromes and its utopias of metaphysical transcendence, it is ultimately the distortions of space, time and consciousness that retain the artist. Because if the matrix grid functions in a spatial and temporal manner, with its Cartesian coordinates x, y, z and its temporal reference t, for Laumond, it is the means by which consciousness reconnects to the multiple dimensions of reality, rather than repressing them. Embedded in rigid frameworks, his work constantly tends to resist the measure of an inflated rationality that detaches us from the sensitive world. In this way, modernist and Western considerations are decentred in favour of notions that privilege movement over structure, relationship over terms, contingency over necessity, otherness over identity. Rather than advocating frontality, modularity or repetition, his installations summon chaos through multiple ramifications and connections, where everything seems to be linked by a thin thread.
In this sense, metaHism is an invitation to multiply perspectives and to embrace complexity. For if for a Westerner, consciousness is always a mental phenomenon: « I think, therefore I am », it is because he apprehends the world only through his unique point of view, according to the symbolic model of the linear perspective that placed him at the centre of the world. By multiplying the focal points, a whole spectrum of consciousnesses is offered to us: animal, vegetable, cellular, molecular or atomic. Mental consciousness is only a human range that does not exhaust the gradation of possible consciousnesses, just as human sight does not exhaust all the gradations of colour nor does hearing those of sound. There is thus a range of consciousnesses, supramental and subramental, inaccessible to the human being, which in fact appear to be impossible, invisible or unconscious. In this way, metaHism is an attempt to reconcile the dichotomies laid down by modernity, and to include the various modes of existence that populate the world. As a result, it is no longer time and space that are the framework of phenomena, but bodies and the imperceptible interactions that influence them, as Einstein foresaw in general relativity. To grasp metaHism, we will therefore have to put on the glasses of a Möbius strip and accept that there is no longer linear or causal time, top or bottom, interiority or exteriority, order or disorder, but an intermingling of all possibilities, of which contingency is the name.

Marion Zilio, Art critic and Curator & Aude Tournaye, Art Critic and Translator.