Matthieu Laurette: A Derivative Monograph (1993-2023)

Matthieu Laurette A Derivative Monograph 1993-2023 - First exhibition monographic work of Matthieu Laurette in a museum in France, this one is the opportunity to return to the work of an artist who has exhibited at several taken up in the institution's spaces as part of collective projects. Five works from his I AM AN ARTIST series are also present in the museum collection. Tracing thirty years of artistic production, “Matthieu Laurette: A Derivative Retrospective (1993 – 2023)” brings together a set of pieces of various typologies (installations, videos, Apparitions, interventions, sculptures, photographs, contracts, works on paper…) while developing several “drifts”, in other words ways of thwarting and divert the codified exercise of the retrospective exhibition; addressing the retrospective itself as a derivative product. \n \nThis is the beginning of a conceptual practice which will seek, in the years to follow, to think the exhibition as a medium and the spaces of definition of art, the modes of enunciation which allow one to call oneself an artist (between recognition by the others and self-proclamation), and to make the boundaries between art worlds (of representation) and real world (of action) more porous. Matthieu Laurette was already deeply marked by the thinking of Guy Debord, such as that developed in The Society of the Spectacle (1967). He will even make this work the material of several works. Refusing the term performance, he will qualify later his practice of Institutional Criticism IRL, adding to the name of this artistic modus operandi whose beginnings are identified at the end of the 1960s (Institutional Critique) the acronym for the expression "In Real Life”, originally used by various online communities to refer to the "real world" (as opposed to the virtual world and fiction). \n \nFor to make this IRL Institutional Critique possible, Matthieu Laurette highlights places a set of action modes and strategies: infiltration, appropriation, diversion, neutralization. It uses all channels of circulation of visual information (print, television, internet, networks social…), developing an aesthetic that feeds on advertising and press (as Pop Art does), perverting the clinical coldness and administrative work associated with conceptual art. In the 1990s, he produced a body of work around Refunded Products: this involves returning the marketing operations (“First purchase refunded”; “satisfied or reimbursed”; etc.) aimed at the sale of consumer products in large quantities surface against themselves, in order to live “reimbursed” or, in other words, for free. Matthieu Laurette, based on this gesture, will create a buzz (as we (he will say later): he appears on television, is on the cover of magazines, publishes a website, and goes on tour in several cities in France with its window truck and its conferences “How to eat for a refund?” for introduce the public to this real way of life. From the Products reimbursed, his work, both in its modes of communication and its content, becomes intrinsically political. \n \nTo look back on these thirty years of artistic production, “Matthieu Laurette: a derivative retrospective (1993 – 2023) » was conceived not as a linear chronological narrative but, as its title indicates it, a drift, in all its polysemy. This is at the same time spatial and temporal: in the heights of the retrospective space, Hanging advertising displays contain images of exhibitions Matthieu Laurette, both souvenir photos and archives of the practice of the artist, they serve as an anchor point for the retrospective, seeking to to resituate the contexts in which the artist operated and to which his works belong are closely linked. Also, four works previously shown at the MAC VAL will be installed exactly in their original location. These "remakes" will sometimes be sources of conflict with the scenography of the exhibition previous (kept for the retrospective) or even between different works. They are also an opportunity to invite other artists to the exhibition, neighbors past works of Matthieu Laurette in other places. In this, The retrospective is not only conceived as a retrospective of works but a retrospective of exhibitions (where the gestures of relating works of project commissioners having included Matthieu Laurette are replayed, at different degrees).