MARCELLE ALIX

Laura Lamiel’s work appeared in the early 80’s and has become more and more complex ever since. The main visual tools she has used are the white unit she calls «brick» and steel. Before, the superhuman aspect of the work would be put forth, since it has seemed to aim at constantly ordering chaos and reaching for the Absolute. Now, as the artist continues to commit to introducing tension into the work, it can be rather interpreted as a will to decompartmentalize space and to adapt studio strategies to the exhibition space.

A Room of One’s Own is the kind of subtitle we could give the exhibition, considering how the work that is shown seems to relate to Virginia Woolf’s strong claims in her 1929 eponymous essay. It also relates to inwardness and to merge the studio space and the mental space. The exhibition space is transitory, or even transitional. The exact place of the work’s existence is that of the eye, and of the brain.
Trying to think about the reflecting effect that Laura Lamiel’s installations have on me, a work by Jeff Wall has come to mind. In After Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, we see a man turning his back to us, in a basement charged with a mass of ordinary objects, clothes and thousands of light bulbs. Light, which is both represented in the image and physically present (the photograph is encapsulated in a light box, according to Wall’s usual practice), both interior and exterior to the work, propagates and contaminates its environment. The name of the author of Invisible Man, sounding strangely similar to that of the inventor of electricity, seems to be mentioned with a purpose to intensify the effect of (real and conceptual) lighting. Laura Lamiel also proposes a work that is saturated with light. White-on-white installations are photographed and copied out on enamelled steel. Intense light travels through the optic nerve to the borders of thought, where speech errors and splitting lie.

The repeated image—of a work in another work, of a sculpture in an image silkscreened into enamel—is not a purely conceptual practice for Lamiel. The enamelled chair, physically included in an installation and also represented on steel close-by, appears to refer to Joseph Kosuth’s strategies. This is barely true, though. The conceptual game which borrows from semiology and figures of speech is here infected by strange objects, like Freudian slips interfering with a very civilized speech. Her work rather refers to the troubled, interior part of what has now become a «style», differentiating itself from other contemporary practices which sometimes mimic the “purity” of Minimalism and Conceptual Art.
To me, it echoes the kind of intense relation that Louise Bourgeois established with the body, the bowels or sex organs. Just like Bourgeois’s Fillette corrupts Brancusi’s Princesse X and sends this smooth and shiny power symbol back to its status of organic and a bit pitiful «»part-object», Lamiel’s brick becomes an element of construction, and of deconstruction of an allegedly pure and masculine Minimalism. When associated with a cactus growing in cotton or with a mysterious black and rounded object, the enamel brick, its regularity and purity, uncovers the obvious limits of a univocal interpretation of Minimalism.Mental projections are a décor that dress up our nature. Civilization (a very popular concept in today’s French political speeches), as rational as it can be presented (through the famous «legacy of the Enlightenment»), can’t conceal a more heterogeneous, less luminous reality, with which we all have to deal.

IA

Laura Lamiel was born in 1948 and lives in Paris. Her works were recently shown at Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris (elles@centrepompidou, 2010), at Grand Palais (La force de l’art, cur. Anne Tronche, 2006), at Maison Populaire de Montreuil (Un plan simple, cur. Le Bureau, 2009). Her most important solo exhibitions include large presentations at National Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2006) and at Musée d’Art Moderne de Grenoble (2001).

Marcelle Alix gallery is pleased to present Le vicomte pourfendu group show.