“I do not believe in utopias. I grew up in a political, economic and social situation which has seen various proposals – in art especially – crumble or else fail to reach any conclusion; conclusions aimed at “resolving” social problems. I do not broach my work with the idea of discovery or invention. Nor do I describe myself as a creative person… to what degree, actually, is the status of artist not simply a more or less economic and legal status?” This statement by Matthieu Laurette suggests the way in which, since the early 1990s, his work has sidestepped the formal categories of art, and is presented like a machinery of infiltration, a game of deconstruction of the socio-economic props which define the individual and his membership of an environment. This atypical artist's project is thus offered as a series of work sites, relentless strategies, in which he instrumentalizes the contemporary areas of communications and media (Internet, TV). All tools which help him to expose and go beyond the perversity, absurdity and paradoxes of an overall system dominated by the free market economy. Based on research into trading practices and processes, Matthieu Laurette undertakes the task of drawing up an inventory of criteria and methods which appraise and distribute norms, functions and territories. From the word go, in 1993, in the series Apparitions, Laurette makes this evident gesture of self-proclamation of his artist's identity. His participation in the TV game show Tournez manège enabled him to declare himself a multimedia artist”, and this in a sphere all the more public than that of art circles. From that time, he has incorporated television like a work surface, using the power, production methods and drawbacks of this medium. As a passive walk-on in certain popular TV shows, or an exemplary character in social subjects, he thus integrates the anonymous place of the public while embodying the trivialized dream of celebrity. Apparitions is this body of work made up of ready-made images which owe just as much to Debord-like criticism of the “society of the spectacle” as to his Warholian apology and his powers of seduction.”

Stéphanie Moisdon

Translated by Simon Pleasance