Laurent Le Deunff
à propostravauxexpositionstextes

Overwhelming the Senses


 

2011

Alexis Vaillant

 What if the fragile and furtive nature of the two art-forms practised by Laurent le Deunnf – drawing and sculpture – were the result of the delicate balance of the artist’s position in taking great care that his oeuvres should be neither over nor under-stated but should simply portray what they are: things that are immediately identifiable? This is a black bone, this is a mini strongbox, this is a mattress, this is a walnut shell, this is a horse sprawling on the ground, this is a small white skull, this is an inert ghost, this is a blurred drawing of a hunter, a sketch of a landscape, a partly-finished study of a tree trunk, drawn horizontally across the page, the remains of a fire etc. Everything would be instantly identified in its quasi-tautological obviousness. We are looking at exactly what we first recognised.

Well almost… but the bone is black and doesn’t belong to any particular animal, the little wooden handle on the strongbox doesn’t open a door, the mattress and the over-sized nut shell are carved from softwood, the skull is the size of the palm of your hand and is covered with a years-worth of the artist’s nail clippings, the floating ghost seems as heavy as a wooden beam, the blurred figures of the hunters are seen as if through a photographic lens, the rutting animals seem to levitate from the central pages of a Moleskine sketch-book and the meticulous Autoportraits dans la Nature seem transformed by internalized alienation etc. At the heart of Laurent le Deunff’s work there is a mechanism, which involves turning the illusion on its head and so reminding us that any worthwhile toy must asks questions. Even if the object is perfectly recognisable – staying on the subject of his sculptures, a bone, a strongbox or a tent – the raw materials are different even if they are similar. This difference creates a short circuit in relation to the original object and this short circuit is what is brings these sculptures to life. 

In order to sell the same thing twice, advertisers use the expression “the same but different” with the understanding that the difference is of more value than the sameness on which the difference is based. Here the bone is made of alabaster, the strongbox of wood, the horse of sack-cloth and the tent of leather… this change in material empties the sculpture of any question of illusion. It isn’t so much a wooden mattress but rather a wood sculpture in the shape of a mattress. This technique of neutralizing the recognisable object by changing the material it is made from is used throughout Le Deunff’s sculptures. In this way the artist is showing us an enigma, a double that is no longer a double. “This is what it is not” – and this object is in fact unrecognisable. This radical, perfectly controlled, conceptual stratagem, works like a reverse trompe-l’oeil and is also favoured by the extremely condensed, squat aspect of the sculptures. Their radicalism avoids any accusation of preciousness. The drawings seem almost as if they have been petrified by silence. This silence reminds us of the silence of the forest or of the artist’s imaginary world from which this work springs. It equally relates back to man’s fundamental solitude in contrast with the perpetual flux, characteristic of our epoch. It is in this way that Le Deunff’s work is capable of overwhelming our senses. As Kafka said; “It is not the eye that captures a scene, it is the scene that captures the eye. It simply overwhelms our senses.” 

This universe, steeped in the imaginary world of the forest, drawing its inspiration from outsider art and post-industrial craftsmanship, homemade with a touch of nerdyness, seems to be somehow introverted while at the same time to be questioning our relationship with the constant flux of our lives and the surface aspect of things. Images from Chasse et Pêche Magazine (translator’s note, publication covering hunting and fishing) and particularly those by Jack Ruskin as well as a certain Internet obsession inspire Le Deunff’s work as much as his staggering discovery of the wild open spaces of Canada he explored in 2006 with a set of pencils, some disposable cameras and a digital video recorder. This icono-conceptual mix, which switches between fascination and intentional distancing, is what renders his work unique and his woodsman’s mythology so charming. In Dead Man (1995), Jim Jarmush filmed the trees is if they were skyscrapers and the landscapes as though they were abandoned lots in New Jersey. The way that Le Deunff composes his drawings and empties them of all narrative content put the spectator in front of an open expanse. This expanse, within the drawing itself (the untouched white of the paper) evokes a certain emptiness. Le Deunff’s work is relatively taciturn. It occupies a discursive vacuum, a place where the convergence of ideas and imagination has reached a critical mass such that – today – any “explanation” seems to have evaporated without leaving the smallest trace. Or perhaps as Nabokov suggests in Transparent Things: “A thin veneer of immediate reality is spread over natural and artificial matter, and whoever wishes to remain in the now, with the now, on the now, should please not break its tension film.”  
    After graduating in history of art and philosophy, Alexis Vaillant began his professional career at the MAMCO in Geneva (CH) (1995-1999) before co-founding the Paris Toasting Agency with Eva Svennung in 1999. He is an independent exhibition curator and has worked together with many important European cultural institutions including the Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris (FR), the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (NL), the EDF Foundation, Paris, the De Appel arts center in Amsterdam, the Centre d'Edition Contemporaine in Geneva, the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt (DE), the ICA in London (UK), the Vilnius Center for Contemporary Art in Lithuania (LT), where he organized the 9th Baltic Triennial and the Bordeaux CAPC (FR), whose artistic programming he supervised between 2009 and 2016.