Often our cerebrations, mental synthesis' and convergent thinkings find difficulty in being visually rendered. It's not the final idea that has difficulty in finding itself a platform, but the conveyance of constructive and creative thought. Through visual images, Laurent Millet offers a meditative insight into the mind's construction of thought, exploration and experimentation.

Millet's black and white images are composed of adhesive elements of photography, sculpture and drawing which combine together to become an exploration of space and composition. The images are devised and ordered through the spatial relations between the human figure and the sculptural forms. The corporeal form is the own's artist body, which engages with the geometric and organic structures. Within the images the production of space is dependent upon the sculptural lines and shapes meandering, with the figure consistently and in a speculative manner interacting with the structures.

More so, the presence of the artist's figure alludes to an unconventional type of self-portrait. The artist's body moves in and out through both an opaque and translucent disposition, which works to evade it's own immanent quality. In this incorporeal temperament, the sculptural forms takes precedence over Millet's body, as the artist interacts with the sculptural form. Constantly, the body and the sculptural forms are in an interaction, as if the artist is in a mode of manipulation through an intuitive and logical thought process. Thus, the physicality of the artist body becomes displaced, it subverts it's own materiality to become the immaterial. The artist becomes present but also absent, materially absence through it's shadowy depiction and it's presence through the mind.

If the body appears disembodied and the sense of physical self begins to fade, there emerges a discernment that the images are depicting the internal workings of the mind of the artist. This appears through the lack of emphasis upon exhibiting the whole body and it's semitransparent appearance. The artist's figure retains it's position as secondary to the sculptural forms, as it loses it's volumetric form and rather renders itself as the metaphysical and immaterial mind. It induces the idea of the Cartesian Mind, where the intellect/mind transcends it's own corporeal being.

One image from Millet's series Translucent Mould of Me (2013), depicts the shadowy form of the human figure, parts of his body proceed back and forth between opaque and translucent. The body is temporally suspended in a liminal space, as the hands reach forward and reveal themselves in great detail. The rest of human figure recedes back into a ghostly appearance, it's form appearing as a smudge of ash or paint as it drifts away. The hands appear to be pushing against the wall, as the thin lines that look like drawing lines from a pen move across the image. The lines are suggestive of scribbles, something perhaps one would see in a notebook for sketching ideas. Here it appears as if the artist was drawing within his own mind and articulating his thought processes.

Millet has indicated that his work is based upon the 'empirical' rather than the conceptual'. What his images reveal is the metaphysical rendering of his experimentation, experience and observation within his artwork. The images convey not a finality and are evasive of the absolute. They aren't presented as absolute and closed pieces, but temporal and contingent fragments that offer the viewer a glimpse into the thought processes and mind of the artist.

www.laurent-millet.com

Text by Hannah Nesbitt | S/TUDIO

SOME/IMAGE : LAURENT MILLET