Aurélien Froment: Montage of attractions

The FRAC île-de-france presents Montage of attractions, the first solo exhibition by Aurélien Froment (b. 1976 Angers, France, works and lives in Dublin) in a public gallery in Paris.

Aurélien Froment‘s work could be conceived as a directory, that he has been freely arranging for a good decade. The authors after which he works – whether they are « visionary craftsmen », « directors of the real » or « philosophers-model makers » – are often secondary characters of history, marginalized by default, possible figures for a counter-history of utopia.

Using films, photographic series or installations, Aurélien Froment appropriates the documentary style to revisit works neither completely tangible nor solely utopian.

At Le Plateau the artist will be installing a specific project revisiting the work of Friedrich Fröbel and Ferdinand Cheval. Playing with a contextual shift and fragmentation, he proposes a reconstruction by staging their works based among others on their photographic reproduction.

While reducing the toys of his era to elementary forms, Fröbel’s project was to enable children to engage with the complexity of the world. This exhibition features for the first time the complete sequence of toys conceived by this pioneer of modern education.

Between 1879 and 1912, Ferdinand Cheval created a monumental work that stills elude interpretation. This exhibition features a selection of figures and architectural details from the enigmatic oeuvre of Hauterives’s most celebrated postman. Montage of Attractions, or how – beyond the suggested (and real) amusement, two seemingly opposite approaches are suddenly brought together, as the reminiscence of one is projected into the deciphering of the other.