Laurent FAULON

(1969- )
Nationality: French

Over the past two decades, Laurent Faulon's work has shifted from performance to sculpture and installation. Often conceiving pieces that resonate with the architectural, political, economic, or social characteristics of their host locations, the artist develops an art of intervention he readily describes as occupation, most often ephemeral and highly contextualized. These projects typically inhabit non-places, abandoned or transitional spaces (wastelands, construction sites, offices, factories, disused shops or dwellings, etc.), thus temporarily making them public.

Laurent Faulon's interventions and installations possess not only a visual dimension but also a sonic, olfactory, and even gustatory one. For his performance Tentative Kebab, Faulon set up a slow, low-temperature cooking system: using car exhaust gases to fuel a pit oven where legs of lamb cooked for 8 hours, the meat then being served as kebabs to the public.

While his taste for provocation and transgression deliberately elicits feelings of unease, sometimes even repulsion, the artist is in reality committed to staging the isolation created by a post-industrial society and the subjugation of the individual to a consumerist economy governed by power dynamics. The material elements used by the artist in his installations are often common and mundane consumer products, sold in hypermarkets, which fuel Faulon's satirical vision of contemporary society and the clutter that constitutes it. His stagings of popular gathering setups, deserted or future feasts and banquets (such as Just Married, 2021; Fête Nat’, 2011; Salon de jardin MonierBau, 2011; Ensemble, 2009) perpetuate the illusion of collectivity and a false promise of community.

Although Laurent Faulon's work may at times appear raw and relentless, it always contains a large dose of self-deprecation and irony, a dark humor that verges on the burlesque.

Text by Zsuzsanna Szabo

1 MOVIE IN DISTRIBUTION

VINGT-SEPT FLEURS POUR MON CHIEN
1997 / b&w / sound / single screen / 13' 00 / 44 €
distribution: 16mm