Laure Marville: Chillin’ like a Villain
“Laure Marville: Chillin’ like a Villain” is the first solo exhibition with Laure Marville (*1990, Lausanne) at Rotwand Gallery.
“Am I Possible? Using Taste as a Playground: Identity as a Position”
When we use a phrase that a thousand people have already cited and recited, there is little risk of error. That’s the recipe for so many commercial successes, from bestsellers to daytime soaps to IKEA paintings. Culture, art or decoration, it’s smooth and simple. Digestible and sweet, it slides down the throat or against the leather covering of a sofa. It’s pre-chewed, re-chewed and regurgitated. Like a trite, ready-made assortment of identities.
Laure Marville is the opposite. And her work is like she is: a fragmented and complex identity whose elements create a f(r)ictional universe that constantly changes its nature with the spectator.
According to Nicolas Bourriaud, post-production artists define themselves via a figure of knowledge characterized by the invention of itineraries through culture. By making this path visible, Laure speaks of identity, of its construction and decryption, and also of its affirmation. For when she borrows a motif of Adolf Loos or a title from Jenny Holzer, it’s not so much an homage as it is a sort of “hard drive” that reflects her visual and cultural education.
From death metal to swiss village traditions, the Lausanne artist navigates an infinite universe of referential signs that are heterogeneous to say the least. Without hierarchy between popular and academic culture, Laure is inspired by all this, using it and redistributing its elements to us in a patchwork that is closer to punk than hippie. She demands the right to do what she wants, all while staying conscious of the fact that “what she wants” is not neutral.
She evaluates convergences of colors, motifs, notions of good and bad taste. But without pushing any solution, without proposing a response, nor a recipe, nor a path to follow. Making the ideas of Adolf Loos her own, Laure is interested in style as something that must, before anything else, be invested with the individual and specific to each. Style must change, age, become transformed along with the individual, be indivisible from the individual, rendering obsolete any questions of fashion, tradition or etiquette, whether we’re speaking of clothing style or the hanging of artworks; struggling to create a sort of hybrid between the human and the thing that is created.
