THE ART OF TENSION
Paris – France
Chills are guaranteed in the dark basement of the Palais de Tokyo, where Laura Lamiel is at work. Magnificent in its play of reflections and frightening at the same time, the visual artist’s first installation will leave you breathless: Immaculately white, a vast expanse of crushed glass, bristling with a metal chair in an untidy position, shines brightly and dazzles us, while as we approach, we discover that it is lined with knives, scissors, penholders, blades, screws and other blunt objects, as well as capsules of laughing gas, sparsely scattered or perfectly aligned.
The trickle of neon light ricocheting off broken glass scattered across a mirrored floor simulating infinite space is matched by the flicker of cutting tools. Beauty and danger are intimately linked here.
Beyond the seduction, fear lurks, like the staggering chair isolated in the centre of the installation, which could well be that of the condemned man… We ourselves perhaps, whose reflection we discover on the other side, in the mirror facing us?
gHOSTS
Pushed to the extreme here, the tension between materials is at the heart of Laura Lamiel’s dramaturgy, the foundation of her aesthetic. Witness the title of this installation, Du miel sur un couteau (honey on a knife), borrowed from a Tibetan monk’s definition of sexuality…
In La Mue and La Mue 2, the artist declines the same opposite sensations of softness and pain, hanging hydrophilic cotton coats and iron-mesh shirts face-to-face, resembling shadows or ghosts, or perhaps our inner demons…
Materialising the presence of absent bodies, coats, like gloves, are recurrent motifs in Laura Lamiel’s work. In the cells, they evoke both imprisonment and inaccessibility. Here too, in these non-penetrable spaces, “intimate territories ” 1 enclosed by transparent or opaque glass walls, or mirrors (one-way or two-way), opposites cohabit. Here, all the tools and materials of the artist’s world are arranged with obsessive care, mixing everyday objects with those of the study or studio: lamps, clothes, books, baubles, suitcases, copper wire, glass, steel, leather, cotton… From coldness to sensuality, the chance encounters are dazzling.
« Intimate Territories »
A metaphor for saturation and alienation, Dans les plis leads us into other “psychic spaces ” 2: in the racks of a vast metal shelf, the artist has accumulated 300 kilos of methodically pleated white linen. Punctuated by fluorescent tubes and shreds of fabric bearing the inscription “Rien n’est à faire, tout est à défaire”, the work sounds like a sinister, or rather, cynical warning. For the artist, “women have always been constrained […] linen is part of these constraints. This linen, these compressions, is a metaphor for a condition in which ‘nothing is to be done, everything is to be undone’.” 2 Installation-sculpture, like the large display of books tinted with red ink – having lost “through this long and meticulous covering process […] their character as books to become ‘simple’ red parallelepipeds “3 -, this “compression” with the allure of a great rampart also reveals the purely formal beauty of the prolific and protean work of the artist who came from minimal art.
- Anne Tronche, La Pensée du chat, éd. Actes Sud / Le Cestet Centre d’Art, Arles, 2000
- Yoann Gourmel, exhibition curator
- Laura Lamiel, interview with Yoann Gourmel, Atelier de l’artiste, Paris, March 2023.
LAURE LAMIEL – Can you hear them?
Palais de Tokyo
Until September 10