A conversation with
Laurent Le Deunff
2021
Steven L. Bridges
Laurent Le Deunff My interest in drawing goes back to my childhood. I remember drawing while watching cartoons on TV, trying to directly reproduce images from the series I liked. When I was at school, drawing was my one of my favorite activities and academic subjects… and the only one where I got the highest grades. It helped me to communicate and make friends with others and that’s still probably true even today. What I like about drawing is its simplicity and the scant means required by the practice. You really don’t need much: a pencil, a sheet of paper and an eraser, as well as a table and a chair. When I began preparing the entrance interviews for art school, I was strongly advised not to show my drawings but to focus on things that had more to do with the “contemporary art scene” or that could be associated with it. So, I pushed drawing to one side during my studies, only occasionally coming back to it, when the idea I was working on justified its use. For example, I would draw hybrid animals, trying to imitate the style of illustration I found in encyclopedias. Shortly after leaving art school, I began to see more and more the necessity of drawing as a means of representing and recounting things that I couldn’t do with sculpture. One of my first series, “Chasseurs flous”,1 was inspired by photos from the magazine Le Chasseur français.2 Using a mechanical pencil, I would meticulously draw the hunters in the style of hunt engravings, while carefully removing their weapons and erasing the background, capturing them alone on a white background, in a kind of romantic blur alongside the hunted animal. Incidentally, Le Chasseur français was also one of the first magazines I came across that ran lonely hearts ads. Obviously, this fascinated me too.
SLB So, the readers weren’t just hunting animals but also maybe a partner or companion of some sort (laughter). Drawing is still an important element in your work but over the past two decades, you’ve done sculptures, public art, installations and created larger environments… When you develop an idea, what determines the format or medium or way of working? How do these different art forms, the ways they communicate, tie in with the conceptual nature of a particular project? Maybe you could give an example?
LLD Today my drawing practice alternates with my sculpture in a continual back and forth movement. Each involves a different tempo, but at the same time they are quite complementary. I try to explore the links potentially uniting these separate mediums and to create a dialog between the two, especially within my exhibitions, like recently with the series about my cat, Grelot. Although my practice revolves principally around drawing and sculpture, I like to open up other fields of exploration; this also depends on the opportunities I’m offered. When I’m invited to exhibit in the open air, I think of my sculptures as entities, if possible, on a human scale, and which take into consideration the environment in which they are presented. What particularly interests me are situations that encourage interaction with the works. For example, the work Hibou3 that is on permanent display on a walking trail, at the Vent des Forêts (in the Meuse area), and which regularly receives offerings left by walkers at its feet in the shape of pine cones. This is one example amongst many… I’m fascinated by the lives these works lead, the way they age and evolve with the surrounding environment, even if they are on display in an urban setting and for a relatively short period.
SLB I really appreciated what you said about your consideration of scenography in the presentation of your works. Looking at older exhibitions, you often use museological display techniques, where the elements are presented on pedestals or supported by metal armatures in different ways. This reproduces the feel of perhaps a natural history museum and lends the pieces the quality of cultural artifacts. More recently I have noticed a shift toward the creation of atmospheric environments for the presentation of your works, where it’s difficult to disassociate the sculptures from the environment itself. Am I right in seeing this as an evolution, where you stage a specific scenography that impacts the spectator’s experience of the works?
LLD Yes, you’re absolutely correct. The first museum I remember visiting was the Museum of Natural History in Bordeaux. As a matter of fact, I make a point of exploring these types of museums in every city I visit and naturally draw inspiration from these museological displays. In my two most recent exhibitions, I’ve attempted to incorporate elements of the outside world inside the “white cube,” producing a décor that’s both natural and artificial and sufficiently alive to enable it to evolve during the exhibition. At Semiose in Paris, we created a clearing reminiscent of an abandoned garden, where some of my recent sculptures and drawings were displayed amongst fern leaves or behind branches. At the Mrac Occitanie in Sérignan (France), we built a cave in which extracts from ten years of research were displayed in the form of a diorama alongside a stone garden. Content and form, both from a conceptual and formal point of view, have not only the potential to transform the spectator’s reading of the objects presented but also their vision of the exhibition space. However, unlike natural history museums, I try to bring the viewer inside these installations.
SLB You work with a range of different materials, many of which are not typically found in an artist’s studio: shells, teeth, fossilized excrement, bones… This kind of material exploration is becoming more common these days in the field of art, but you tend to push the envelope in the materials you employ or find meaning in. Wood is also obviously an important element in your sculptures and creation of totemic and ritual objects. Can you tell us about how you arrive at the materials you use and why?
LLD Sometimes I just buy certain materials, but most of what I use and what inspires me originates from wherever I happen to be working at the time. I also discover things during research trips, holidays and other moments when I’m traveling. Sometimes people give me things, often oddities that might interest me for sculptures… When I was a student, I was highly influenced by Californian artists such as Tim Hawkinson and Tom Friedman, as well as animal sculptures by Barry Flanagan, Germaine Richier, and Louise Bourgeois, and my early sculptures of animals were created with humble materials. I sought out materials that were at odds with the subjects in order to invite a variety of readings, especially poetic ones. This is still the case today. I collected composted grass from my parents’ house and modeled a cow that appeared to be in bronze. Some discarded cardboard, shaped by car tires during one snowy winter, was used for a sculpture of a baby elephant (Mammouth, 2001). I collected hair from hairdressers and dreadlocks from fine art students in Bordeaux for the fur of a Saint Bernard (2001). All these sculptures were on a life-size scale and could seemingly have an illusionary effect on the spectators or at least cause some doubt about the materials I had used to produce them. My first direct carvings were made using cow’s teeth, from a skull given to me by a student, who had given up on the idea of mounting it on the bumper of his car.
SLB Does the material for an artwork decide the subject or content? I mean, do the qualities of the material predetermine the subject, or is this part of your negotiation with the material itself?
LLD Often the material inspires the subject but sometimes it’s the opposite. When I started to sculpt wood, it was for obvious reasons: for its atmospheric qualities (I’m thinking of the “Log Lady” in Twin Peaks), for its availability—it was easy to find—and the ecological commitment it imposed. The question was: what should I carve? I began with a large walnut inside a log from a chestnut tree that also came from my parents’ garden. After I returned from a long stay in Canada, mainly having been on Vancouver Island in British Colombia, there were the Totems, which took on the upright form of Pez candy dispensers. Then there were the Fantômes…4 Working with wood led to papier-mâché and pulpboard, which were lighter and easier to work with, especially in my studio at the time that was in the basement of my apartment. During that period, I was also influenced by Philip King, who made his linoleum cones in his attic—it was a flexible material and could be taken down his stairs. Myself, I made tents and teepees with leather cut from old sofas. I’ve always been interested in ephemeral materials or things that have already lived their lives and thus potentially contain within them an awareness of what living means as well as death. In spite of all this, papier-mâché has recently led me to work with bronze and specialized founders. In the same way, drawing and carving wood pushed me towards working with a rocaille sculptor,5 with whom I’m currently collaborating.
SLB Returning to your drawings, at times it appears that a drawing may provide the impetus for a sculpture, or maybe vice-versa. Is this actually the case? Can one observe causality like this across certain veins of your practice?
LLD Except when I’m obliged to, for example to give more precision to an idea, to prepare an installation or to carry out studies within the framework of a project, I rarely draw my sculptures or sculpt what I draw. An exception would be Foyer (2008), which may appear to have been inspired by the series of drawings “Dans le bois” (2006). I did however think about this question last year, when I thought about using my photographs for the series about my cat, Grelot. Over a number of years, I’d been putting together a collection of images of the cat posing next to the finished and unfinished sculptures in my studio. These images made me think of the book, Why Cats Paint?, by Heather Busch and Burton Silver (1994, Ten Speed Press). Even if the idea was a bit far-fetched, I liked the idea that someone might think it was the cat who had done the sculptures. In any case, from a psychic point of view, it wasn’t completely impossible…! I was interested in several aspects—as well as paying homage to this cat, a faithful and ever-present companion—such as: how to invent, through my old-fashioned looking drawing, another narrative for these works and to bring their origin into question; how to invoke in this way a different temporality that might seem fantastical, yet was actually real? I also had the idea of organizing an exhibition with just the pieces the cat had chosen to pose next to and fall asleep, as if he had taken on the role of curator for the exhibition I was preparing.
SLB There seems to be a dialog in your practice between the artistic and the quasi-scientific, an artistic study of nature and natural phenomena that brings to mind the objective study of the natural world we can observe in many scientific disciplines. It occurs to me that in looking at your wider practice, one could group your work into categories, perhaps by material or subject. Does this suggest that ideas or the material substrates from which the artwork grows operate as specimens of study?
LLD That’s a very good question but I’m not sure I have an answer for you. To be perfectly honest, I am more influenced by my fascination for a particular material or form than by a need to create categories: for me everything is just part of a whole. I don’t think there are any fixed rules within my approach, especially as it evolves on a day-to-day basis. I let myself be carried along by what I see in front of me, what inspires me and what I have at hand. That’s also probably why there are so many recurring themes and materials. Deep down, there is also a desire to “exhaust” a particular subject or at least to study all the different possibilities of representing the same object. Let’s take my tooth sculptures as an example. The first head I sculpted dates back to 2003. From there, I went on to attempt a self-portrait. Then someone gave me a donkey’s tooth that was bigger, so I made a bust. Then there was a monkey head and a flayed man… Fifteen years later, I rediscovered a desire to sculpt teeth and I bought a horse tooth at a flea-market in Brittany, from which I sculpted a nude. Then, I placed an ad on social media and ended up with about a dozen teeth. This gave me sufficient material to consider creating a series and I chose to represent the evolution of man in five sculptures. As far as the sculptures you might classify as ritual objects are concerned, I’ve always been fascinated by anthropological museums and they have become a major source of inspiration, both in terms of the objects on display and the way they are presented. The question is, what to do when you are a cisgender, straight, white male, father of a child and living in provincial France? So, I try to work using my own intuition, often influenced by my encounters with these objects, constantly asking myself what I could do today. This is where the choice and origin of the material takes on its importance. For Totems (2007) the choice of oak from Dordogne was important to me, and I specifically chose to represent heads of large animals that I might have come across during my trip to Canada. The idea that these somewhat Pop-styled sculptures should resemble Pez candy dispensers came however before my trip there. One final example in response to your question: between 2012 and 2017, I began to take an interest in fake stones. I googled “how to make fake rocks” and followed the various recipes to the letter. They were shared by an incredible variety of people: an animal photographer, a man who was crazy about garden ponds, an adolescent fan of role playing games, an aquarium decorator, and even a retired granny explaining how to make a Christmas crèche. From the polystyrene remainders of a mountain sculpture (Marie-Hélène, 2017), I managed to make nine different rocks, which were put on show for the first time at the Pontmain Art Center as a landscape, arranged around a papier-mâché tree stump, based on photos of a cairn that was probably constructed by monkeys. A few months later, the rocks were used in another exhibition at Château-Gontier and were presented in an enormous wooden bookcase, as if part of a museological collection and which was inspired by a humorous drawing by Gary Larson showing prehistoric men in the middle of a library of rocks: “You know, I used to like this hobby… But shoot! Seems like everybody’s got a rock collection nowadays.”
SLB To continue on the subject of the unusual materials you turn to in your pieces, for instance, dinosaur excrement, quartz, shells and different types of wood. I can’t help reading an interest in time in your choices of material, and in certain cases a conversation with deep time, geologic time. Do you think of different timescales as you produce your work and how the materials you use are connected with or communicate about humanity’s relationship to time? I’m thinking about things like petrification, fossil records, future artifacts, and even ancient chewing gum…
LLD You are again quite correct but chance and poetic vision play an equally important role in my encounters with these materials. The fact that they are sometimes quite ancient can lend the sculptures a certain form of credibility. Once again, we’re going back to the idea of materials that have had a previous life… I discovered the existence of coprolites in the Jurassic section of the Natural History Museum in Brussels. I took photos of them and with the idea in mind of creating little men made of shit, I began to buy a few on eBay in order to sculpt them. The pink quartz I used to make chewing gum belonged to my mother, who had a collection of stones she was getting fed up with. A few have ended up broken or missing over the years and she never noticed her pink quartz had disappeared… Obviously, I’m quite interested in the notion of sedimentation as well as fossilization and the petrification of sculptures. In fact, my latest exhibition plays on this, particularly its title, My Prehistoric Past. Over the last fifteen years, I’ve made three caves out of cardboard and brown wrapping paper. This time, we decided to make a more solid version that appears to be part of the building and might even have been discovered recently. In the second space, the floor is covered in gravel, as if after an excavation. Certain of my works are aged voluntarily— the bas reliefs of animal burrows for example—others are left to the natural effects of entropy. Once, when I was invited to exhibit in the same museum five years later, I chose to present exactly the same piece in the same place: A large papier-mâché seashell on a metal table, which had gone rusty in the intervening time.
SLB I’m sure the strong surrealist tendencies in your work have already been remarked upon. From an art historical perspective, does the surrealist movement hold special weight for you as an artist? And if so, in what ways?
LLD I really appreciate this question because up until today no-one has ever made the comparison between my work and this movement, even though it’s rather obvious. I discovered Arcimboldo when I was a child. When I was very young, I was given a catalog about Dalí and a little book published by Gallimard—Une génération entre le rêve et l’action—that I still have today. These were the first artworks that I tried to copy. But to tell the truth, very few of the artists from this movement really interest me, apart from Meret Oppenheim, Dorothea Tanning, Magritte’s “cow period,” and the sculptures by Giacometti from the same era. I should also mention Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio De Chirico, and certain of Picabia’s pieces that might fit in with this list. I must admit I prefer to view Surrealism through the work of later artists who were influenced by it such as Ed and Nancy Kienholz and particularly Robert Gober, whose obvious connection with Magritte was brought to the fore in the programming of the Los Angeles MOCA in 2000. It was also at this time that I discovered Jim Shaw and his book of drawings entitled Dreams. It’s true that I consider all my exhibitions as dreamlike spaces; the play on scale in my sculptures can be read as poetic forms and the various associations of ideas as visions from dreams. But alongside theatricality, narrative, straight representation or illustration, Surrealism was pretty much banned in the art school where I studied. I have the impression that at the time everyone preferred Dada, which is probably why I took other paths. I forgot to mention the influence that Alaskan Eskimo masks had on me and some of my sculptures, where bodies emerge from animal forms, chimeras and oversized objects appear, collages of sharks swimming among mushrooms… Interestingly, my recent collaborations with the rocaille sculptor Philippe Le Féron head in a very similar direction!
SLB When I visited you in the winter of 2017, you gave me a small spiral-bound book, split horizontally into three sections, containing drawings of fantastic animals, hybrid beasts that are composites of different animal species blended together. It’s a surrealist play on the exquisite corpse and by interchanging the horizontal segments, you can compose your own creatures. I passed this book on to my daughter and it regularly reappears around the house—it’s become a real part of our family life! It’s a kind of fantasy game for children, but within which there is a subconscious call, a beckoning that teases the mind into wondering what other meanings it might hold. I’d be interested in hearing more about your fascination for the imaginative worlds of children and how the psychology of dreams plays a role in your work?
LLD This book was published as part of a public commission for a primary school in Saint-Denis in the suburbs of Paris, which consisted of an installation with three chimeric sculptures, inspired by the cut-up picture books I had as a child and continued to use as a student. The sculptures were created from nine animals, whose physical characteristics and skin textures seemed to me to be interesting to tackle. It was at this point that the idea of making a booklet from my study drawings came up, leaving blank pages for the pupils to complete by inventing their own animals based on parts of my drawings. My sculptures often take the form of children’s toys. They are a direct source of inspiration because I love their simplicity and humor. I reproduce them on a completely different scale, using very different materials, so they can be read in different ways, while retaining a share of mystery, thus stimulating the imagination.
SLB Much of your work ultimately seems to me to be about metamorphosis and transformation. This can take the form of material, physical or mental transformation or shifts in perception. Looking through your body of work, I find myself returning time and again to Ovid and his Metamorphoses. In the opening lines of the poem he writes: “I intend to speak of forms changed into new entities…” This would seem to apply to your own work. If so, what role do things like love, power and the struggle between art and nature play? What bearing do these things have on your work?
LLD That’s a perfectly valid comment! All of the things you mention play a part in my work. In any case, I try to make sure they are present, alongside the panoply of genres I invoke: the grotesque, the funny, the serious and the macabre, to mention just a few… They are certainly also present due to the fact that I never feel alone when I’m working. I’m surrounded by ghosts, I let myself be carried away by the artists whose work inspires me, the texts I read and the radio programs I listen to.
SLB There is a mythical quality about your work, not so much that your work is of mythical stature, but that it seems inspired by the “universality of myths,” as the author and theoretician Joseph Cornell once put it. Can you tell us a little about your interest in myths and how the mythical becomes material in your practice?
LLD When I was young, I was fascinated by Greek mythology and by astrology because of an animated series I used to watch. Clash of the Titans (1981) by Desmond Davis, which was based on the myth of Perseus, was also something that had an enormous impact on me as a child. I would say that my sense of aesthetics and my love of pasteboard owes a great deal to Ray Harryhausen’s special effects! Like Surrealism, mythology has permeated my practice, whether consciously or not. The myth of Sisyphus comes to mind, which I re-enacted by rolling a snowball up a mountain in the Massif Central. I have evoked other myths in my work, but always in a quirky way: this, in my mind, can provide keys to reading certain works. And of course, when you are a sculptor, how can you avoid thinking of Medusa or Frankenstein?
2. The French Hunter.
3. Owl.
4. Ghosts.
5. Rocaille sculpting is the art of producing “fake wood” from cement, often found in
parks and gardens.