Laurent Lamarche

Laurent Lamarche’s practice straddles the worlds of science, history, and philosophy, shaping a kind of archaeology of the future, to use philosopher Fredric Jameson’s term. Like Jameson, who views utopia as a political lever for rethinking otherness, Lamarche does not offer a vision of a utopian future synonymous with perfection, but instead proposes a visual poetry of “forthcoming,” traversed by the hybrid imaginary of science fiction. An encounter among the uses and codes of the laboratory, the museum, and futurist narrative, the Fossile series (2013–19) comprises vitrified landscapes that suggest views through a telescopic or microscopic lens. Engraved on large Plexiglas panels are motifs resembling constellations of fossilized objects, organisms, and plants, complex living systems whose proliferation has suddenly been curtailed. Lamarche conjugates the infinitely large with the minute, blurring our spatiotemporal bearings and inviting us to contemplate the world of the living with renewed curiosity and understanding. Seductive and familiar, Lamarche’s installations echo the “disturbing strangeness” inherent to Freudian psychology. This tension between the known and the unknown, the real and the fictitious, pragmatism and the occult underlies the singular aesthetic of Fossile and its timeless landscapes of flourishing microbial flora that seem ready to contaminate humanity. Unlike apocalyptic or idealistic representations pro-posing an unfathomable future or a mythologized past, Lamarche’s works not only contain traces of their own destruction (the act of engraving itself weakens the Plexiglas support) but also evoke their ominous persistence. Indeed, in dialogue with the notion of the archive, Fossilepresents fragments of (Foucauldian and biological) heterotopies that remind us of the ambiguous nature of preserving bacterial or pathogenic specimens in the laboratory. Fascinating and strange, Lamarche’s work invites us to rethink the living in light of the ties that bind nature, humanity, and technology closer every day. Translated from the French by Louise Ashcroft Laurent Lamarche Fossile BM - 01, 2016. Photos : permission de l’artiste | courtesy of the artist Laurent Lamarche Fossile HM - 03, détail | detail, 2014Photos : permission de l’artiste | courtesy of the artist Laurent Lamarche Fossile FP, détail | detail, 2019. Photos : permission de l’artiste | courtesy of the artist Laurent Lamarche Fossile, Pétri 12, 2018. Photos : permission de l’artiste | courtesy of the artist Laurent Lamarche Fossile, Pétri 12, 2018. Photos : permission de l’artiste | courtesy of the artist

Laurent Lamarche

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