Bertrand Lamarche
Anne Bonnin is welcoming Bertrand Lamarche.
Listen to the lecture on France Culture !
A luminous reticular cloud moves slowly to the ceiling and draws indefinite figures, galaxies in which each one will project beings or things according to his/her imagination. However, it is an image, whose movement results from a simple device, animated by a quasi-watchmaking mechanism: the image is indeed the reflection of a light on a rotating plate, covered with mirror paper. Its original title Réplique (2008) was transformed into (Réplique (baphomètre) when it was taken back to the Gallery of Missing Species at the Museum of Natural History, in 2012, enriched by a mysterious name, etymologically uncertain: in Pierre Klossowski’s eponymous novel, Baphomet refers to an occult power, a figure of wisdom and a rite of the Order of the Knights Templar: it is a breath that circulates and passes from one character to another, a principle Klossowski describes as « the prince of modifications. » Lamarche’s Baphomètre, which is inspired by it, is therefore the measure of an intangible principle that he also concretizes.
This work is perfectly representative of Lamarche’s art which is based on recurrences of abstract and concrete figures, such as the spiral, the vortex, the whirlwind, the torus, but also objects, such as the model or record player. For twenty years, he has been creating installations, devices, more exactly, that produce images, sound and movement, based on concrete facts. His models of architecture thus refer to urban projects of the 1950s and 1960s in Nancy, while many works reproduce physical or meteorological phenomena, particularly cyclone or haze, in the form of rudimentary special effects. Invaded by a fog, his models are transformed into decorations of entropic mutations (Fog Factory, Map). Filmed in real time and projected on a big screen, a whirlwind in a small jar becomes a tornado in a desert (Vortex, Kathy). A rotating record player, coupled with a film camera, produces the cosmic image of a torus (Tore, Cosmodisco). These devices are generally simple: falling under the DIY and the domestic experiment and scientific, they offer the spectacle of their operation in real time. They are also machines of vision, involving a disjunction between internal and external perception. A video filmed inside the model of a tunnel sucks us into an infinite space-time (Cyclotunnel). His works, which often function in a closed circuit, suggest states of hypnosis and fascination that could « look like a camera filming the image it produces.” Lamarche discreetly distils an absurd irony, like this aluminum cylinder, a blower duct, which turns on itself (Lobby (hyper-torus)).
Our conversation with Bertrand Lamarche will be an opportunity to go back to the themes and figures that haunt his work and constitute his universe. We will invoke his ghosts, through the films, the books, the music, which inhabit and inspire him.
This conversation will also give us the chance to present the artist’s catalog, The Plot, published in December 2018 by La Maréchalerie / ENSA V, National School of Architecture of Versailles, texts by Ingrid Luquet-Gad and Nathalie Leleu.
