The visitor to the national sports museum must not approach Laurent Perbos’s exhibition by attributing to the displayed objects their primary meaning, their utilitarian sense.
Moreover, this would quickly prove impossible with the ping-pong tables. The visual artist transforms basketballs and turns them into a three-dimensional painting, expressing the colors of the rainbow. The most commonplace things become treasures through their association: ingots, diamonds, precious stones. The treasure is both the beginning and the end (understand the ultimate goal). Each element is known for the banality of its purpose. It’s the fusion of these elements that raises questions.
Laurent Perbos describes a society of leisure, a society that is above all playful. With bicycle wheels, he creates minimalist designs. Painting without painting, the rainbow represents all the paintings. Each object seems to be inhabited, animated, alive, it has a life of its own. We enter the spiritual realm, and the artist takes us into extreme Eastern mythologies including Chinese, life having been given by a drop of the god’s blood. There is a genesis, and the cinder block is the best illustration.
It’s with it that one builds a wall, then a house, then it becomes a work of art. Superheroes for the layman, mythology for the initiated? That would be too reductive, as both concepts interlock. There are myths, metaphors. Laurent opens his garden to us, and the giant candies, abstraction or figuration?
It’s up to each person to answer that according to whether they’ve kept their childlike spirit. The concrete ball, a symbol of weight, effort, and time. The silver surfer, the conical target with a pointed center. The ping-pong tables, a tube where the ball would never fall, is it an athletic track or a golf course and the wavy table, bumpy ping-pong? Everything is illusion, said the thinker to explain his wisdom. Here the artist invites us to reflect, to think and to escape the reductive constructs given to objects,
Laurent Perbos frees the object from its primary use to give it another destiny, another purpose and the collection of beach buoys, if they evoke holidays for some, will be an invitation to imagine this cluster as a work of art, a modern sculpture in line with artists like Arman or César.
Laurent Perbos offers us a journey into this land where mythology, myths, fantasy, and wonder are the echoes and the setting that will always enchant the child dormant deep within each of us.
Thierry Jan.
