“Je croyais voir un piège”, by Laurent Millet (2012)

Je croyais voir un piège (“I thought I saw a trap”) is a 2012 set of photographs and sculptures by French artist Laurent Millet, exhibited at the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (Paris).

The works come from a residency of the artist in the park of Belval (Ardennes, France), the former hunting ground of the museum’s founders.

In the middle of the forest, the artist recreates and old hunting device in the form of a funnel. The animals get engulfed in a net and get stuck. Millet’s sculptures resembles these devices, except they are augmented in size and formed only by a string. The strings trace a strange architecture in space which is not a trap anymore, or rather it is only a visual trap that leaves the animal free to escape.

 

 

“There is , in Laurent Millet, a taste for the method. However, his work does not follow any system. The poetic part of the method always takes over and is like a frame that would act like a metaphor of thought as a whole. Hence the strange presence of the “brainy” in his art: the scent of speculation is everywhere but instead of fainting, it turns into shapes …
It is not an object but spatial masses, elementary structures, structures in development, folding processes, processes of antimatter and sometimes, of remains. This part of the corpus of Laurent Millet is the one that most relates him to the generation of monumental sculptors… But behind the play of references, it is necessary to try and characterize what is at stake in an important part of his work: a permanent experience of the plan. For Laurent Millet works on the basis of the perception, showing that photography constitutes a workspace by the fact that it unfolds a vision through planes – by the perspectivist regulation given by the optical machine. Whereas the eye takes stock, the mechanical optics plans the vision – this technical axiom allows to watch the game created by Laurent Millet by defining forms in space. ”

Michel Poivert (From the catalog published on the occasion of the exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Angers Enfantillages Pittoresques, éd. Filigranes). Original text in French from here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Via: Rudy/Godinez