NYAB Event - Laurent Millet "The Last Days of Immanuel Kant"

Laurent Millet "The Last Days of Immanuel Kant"

Robert Mann Gallery

This event has ended.

The title of the exhibition is taken from Thomas de Quincey's novella of the same name, in which the narrator describes the declining health and diminished perceptual faculties of the eminent philosopher, rendering Kant less capable of interpreting the world around him. Millet takes Kant's waning powers as the inspiration for his own explorations of phenomenological doubt. For all of their pleasurable optical revelations, Millet's constructions are hardly the effects of a naïve dabbler, but rather make knowing and winking reference to a wide-range of Modernist art and scientific discoveries. From Tatlin's Constructivist reliefs to molecular models: against this matrix of signs, Millet's work evinces a critical doubt and wonder at our ability to understand and perceive the world around us in any objective fashion.

Millet's images revel in the deceptions and revelations of sculptural form. But rather than emphasizing the material weight of his constructions, the dominant effect is of light and color intervening in the specific spaces of their construction. The sheer white walls, floor, and furniture of the archetypal studio create a sort of depthless blank slate for explosions of color (or alternatively a nearly desaturated achromaticity). Recalling Dan Flavin's fluorescent light tube installations or Calder's wire constructions, Millet's ephemeral forms interrogate the particulars of the space they occupy. Other works in the exhibition continue this interest in spatial illusionism and rendering of architectural space. In Les Vacances de Dusseldorf, a suite of nine hand-painted photographs, it appears that the artist has created simple drawings of buildings on top of the photographic surface; in fact the linear framework of the sketch is rendered using yarn in three dimensions within his studio. Only as an (over-painted) photograph does it achieve it's intended trompe-l'oeil effect.

Media

• Photography
• Sculpture

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