New monograph.
Laurent Montaron's practice—spanning film, photography, installation, sound, and performance—investigates strategies of vision. It is a media archaeology examining the ways in which technological innovations have continually given rise to new ways of observing and understanding the world. Often frustrating the viewer's experience, Montaron's works evoke the limits of the visible, where meaning is deferred or denied, pointing to "a crack in a logic of image-production and circulation which tends to resolve everything—art included—into the operative."
Conceived to document three solo exhibitions—Dioramas at Pernod Ricard Foundation, Paris (2016–17), the show at Les Moulins de Paillard in Poncé-sur-le-Loir (2018), and Replica at CCA – Center for Contemporary Art Tel Aviv (2018)—the publication also features essays by Philippe-Alain Michaud and Mike Sperlinger that offer a comprehensive overview of the artist's oeuvre, extending across nearly twenty years.
"Montaron's allegiances are clearly, in part, to a tradition of conceptual art practice which has always questioned the 'visual' emphasis of the visual arts; but he seems also to be responding to a more general hypertrophy of the photographic. . . . The repeated gesture of tantalizing withdrawal—the sense that the meaning of his works is constantly obscured in some way, inaudible, invisible—seems calculated to make us feel the limits of the photogenic. To put it another way, one of Montaron's primary materials is our own anxiety, in its most inimitably millennial form: fear of missing out."—Mike Sperlinger
The work of Laurent Montaron (born 1972 in Verneuil-sur-Avre, lives and works in Paris ) is suffused with the contemporary history of the
media. From the mechanical techniques of representation of the late nineteenth century through to today's different forms, the media have always given rise to irrational beliefs. Photography changed the perception of space, but with the recording and reproduction of image, sound and voices, time itself seems to have changed. Through his investigations of the tools that shape our representations Montaron lays bare the paradoxes that accompany our awareness of modernity.
