Lucie Laflorentie
Lucie Laflorentie re-explores in her sparse manner a singular relationship to space, juggling diverse mediums (drawing, video, installation…). She nourishes her reflections with artifacts imbued with malice and poetry, which propose to the viewer the possibility to take in space from another angle.
Laflorentie harbors a profound attachment to the agricultural world in which she was raised, a world founded on the respect for the earth, where tools and manual labor occupy a central position. From a childhood spent roaming fields where Man introduced the line (agricultural buildings with traces of cultural organization), edifying small mounds of land at the foot of the hill, in mirrors distorted by the infantile confusion of proportions, germinated a dynamic of looking that she continues to explore. In her models made with simple and raw materials (wood, plaster), games of scale continue to play out.
In her installations, her dispositive looks to open the field of vision, to run through the exhibition space by projecting a far-off point of escape, above the horizon line. She simultaneously prolongs this work on perspective in her architectural landscapes. Her questioning of the setting into motion of the observer, reminiscent of the tracking shot in cinema, nourishes still more her experiments of creative contemplation. This ensemble of work constitutes a corpus whose continuum is an invitation to the viewer to let his or her gaze navigate new configurations.
The video installation Sprinkler is a fixed shot of a field in which a sprinkler, object as subject, is placed so that a rainbow bursts forth intermittently, as soon as the sprinkler head reaches a certain position in its rotating movement. This video is projected inside a cabin made of shipping palettes, creating a certain intimacy and favoring meditative withdrawal. Like the windows of sorting hangars that open onto the land, the video incites the gaze’s projection towards the immensity of the outside: here, the frame is not limiting, it is experienced as a trampoline that gives a supplementary effect to the perspective.
This work on framing thus completes the composition of the desired pictorial image, in echo with Renaissance landscape painting.
And then the artist erases herself, and the Sprinkler takes the lead in a procedure of mise en abyme. In creating the rainbow, we find a generator of color that enriches that palette of the image. With this gesture, the artist erases herself before the Sprinkler, which in turn becomes a demiurge.
Contrary to what her recent, more engaged, pieces suggest, here Laflorentie more soberly invites the viewer to re-experience this memory-like sensation of childhood, Proustian, that of the evanescent enchantment with a rainbow.
However, this often fleeting, almost frustrating spectacle, here also shares the stage with desire. In this looped video, the repetitive rhyme of the pump and the spraying of water nudges the viewer towards a form of hypnosis in the spectator, clinging onto the infinite possibility of the return of the phantasmagoria.
The mechanical is thus fetishized, by its symbolic operation of the competition of the forces of Man and the forces of Nature. The sprinkler crystalizes this reciprocal fabrication, in materializing a kind of collaborative demiurge. As the collision of water and light generates this magical flood of color, the productive meeting of Nature and agriculteur creates an unexpected landscape, optimized by a conceptual hybridization
S.B.
