Ianick Raymond & Laurent Lamarche
Ianick Raymond is interested in the tools and methods that make it possible to reproduce fragments of the real, all the while instilling a doubt in the viewer regarding the nature of the image. Through an exploration of optical effects and trompe-l'oeil, the artist evokes and stages the parameters of what constitutes both painting and its reception. With subtle breaks and lags, he juxtaposes prints and painting to create vibrate pictures in which the limits of each medium can no longer be discerned.
Ianick Raymond is interested in the tools and methods that make it possible to reproduce fragments of reality, while still introducing doubt in the viewer as to the nature of the image. Through an investigation of optical effects and trompe l'oeil, the artist convokes and stages the parameters that constitute both the painting and its reception. With subtle shifts, he juxtaposes print and paint to create vibrant paintings where the limits of each medium become impossible to define.
For his part, Laurent Lamarche seeks ways of entering into the image, so as to reveal its depth. His works are reminiscent of scientific visualization instruments, such as X-ray photography, which makes it possible to represent invisible layers, structures and skeletons. Here, the technology serves to expose a material with an organic appearance, which evokes living things and lends itself to a certain representation. But the specimens that are thus catalogued are always sufficiently familiar for us to doubt in their real of fictional character.
In extending this science-influenced aesthetic, the mural conceived by the two artists creates a real bond between their practices, both in the spatial set up and in the combination of their formal and conceptual interests. In fact, the motifs—initially created from the suction traces left on two acrylic coated plates after their separation—were then magnified, enlarged and reframed by way of a digital process. In this encounter between an analog and a technological manipulation of materials, fractal forms emerge like numerous contact points between mathematics and biology.
Though the artists did not jointly create the other pieces presented in the exhibition, their spatial layout, like the elements in dialogue, highlights a shared approach that recalls archaeology. Indeed, the selected works function a bit like vestiges and bear the imprints of the process that led to their emergence. In this itinerary, they become enigmatic objects, like artefacts taken out their contexts, traces left at once by human intervention and by natural phenomena. This then is perhaps the most promising path in this duo, in this back-and-forth between art and living beings that one carries out with the artefact.
A text by Emmanuelle Choquette
