contemporary art magazine issue # sixteen december ... - Karyn Olivier

MOUSSE / AURÉLIEN FROMENT / PAG. 70
accentuated by the idea of illusion and reality, past and present,
and presence and absence, suggested by the fact that the books
which inspired the project are not included, that the island is
a symbol of uncertainties and has become a monument to the
persistence of memory, and that the entire operation shifts from
the level of reading to the level of questioning the focus of our
attention: is it the bookshelf? Is it the history of the island? Is it
the utopia of Arcosanti? Is it the illusion of a form of wandering
that puts down roots?
The manipulation of text, language and the very process of
constructing images becomes more complex when it starts off
from a publishing project, as in the case of L’Archipel (2003-
2007), commissioned by the Centre National de la Photographie
in Paris. Along with Pierre Leguillon, who oversaw the graphic
layout, the artist selected a series of images, organized around
three thematic islands. The piece acts as a sequence of three
windows, each revealing a collection of books and objects
grouped together on pasteboard. After selecting texts and
images, Froment moved on to constructing spaces, creating an
archipelago of meanings and references – ranging from Yona
Friedman to Werner Herzog and many others – that are often
indecipherable, but flawlessly compiled. Perec, after all, was the
one who wrote “Think/Classify”.
This juxtaposition hinges on investigating the role of images, their
rules, the truth or falsehood of their content and their infinite
Aurélien Froment, Pour en finir avec la profondeur de champ (My final words on the depth of field) - courtesy: STORE, London
Aurélien Froment, The Apse, the Bell and the Antelope - courtesy: STORE, London
potential to create sequences, vehicles for an equally infinite
number of meanings. It is the card game that Froment lays out so
skillfully in his more recent Who Here Listens (to) BBC News on
Friday Nights? (2008).
The focus of the video L’Adaptation Manifeste (2008), on the
other hand, is the idea of recording the process, and of film as
an investigation of daily life. A sort of cinematic anthology of
“reading” – and also a more or less explicit citation of a series
of paintings of young girls reading (from Fragonard on) – this
video is a sequence of cinematic remakes, in which the artist
asked actress Karine Lazard to reenact famous reading scenes
featuring well-known actresses in films d’auteur. The monitor
shifts from Julienne Moore in The Hours to Stanley Kubrick’s
Lolita, by way of Fahrenheit 451.
Théatre de poche (2007) is a boîte-en-valise about the manipulation
of images. In this twelve-minute video, a man pulls pictures out
of his pockets, facing a theatre full of spectators. The theme is
the relationship between the monitor and the body, gadgets, the
iTouch, things that have radically transformed our daily habits
and behaviour. Froment links the past to the present, because
the person manipulating images, objects, and devices is actually
a magician, a pivotal figure in the world of spectacle, illusion, and
fiction who pushes modern man’s capacity for doubt to the limits of
endurance. This is a choreography, a puzzle, a labyrinth of tunnels
like Perec’s La Vie or the housing units of Arcosanti.