Trained in contemporary art and photography, Laurent Millet combines his practice of photography with all the other arts: drawing, video, installation, and performance. Using several devices that he often combines, he builds a vocabulary that is situated at the limits of the visible and questions its relativity, between perception and imagination. Observatories, architectures, models, tools and measuring devices are recurrent in the artist’s work, contributing to the construction of what he calls a «measured reverie».
À peu près Euclide opens a new chapter in this dreamy science. Here, his drawings of sculptures intended to support the strange epitaphs listed in Valère Novarina’s Discours aux animaux and the creation of forms arising from a playful foray into the diagrams of a treatise explaining Euclidean geometry conceived by Oliver Byrne have come together. Based on the three primary colours, the graphic language elaborated in 1850 by this educational engineer composes a systemic and visually very strong whole, in which Laurent Millet has detected a premonition of the modernist imagination, whose aesthetic forms were often accompanied by pedagogical and social utopias. One thinks of De Stijl, the Bauhaus, but also the theosophical paintings of Hilma af Klimt.
By interpreting these forms as he pleases in the creation of his models, Laurent Millet assimilates them to a score, extrapolating their principles all the more easily as he seems to have intuitively grasped their spirit. Photographed from an angle that often makes us see them slightly overhanging, these forms create the illusion of spatial depth. Their design and colours are reminiscent of the pop extravagance of the Memphis group design objects. Their colourful motifs, reminiscent of seaside resorts or the circus, sometimes give them a rhythm. They combine their childlike joviality with a walk between worlds that we can guess is both playful and attentive, of which they would be the milestones, situated somewhere between the stele and the trophy.
Marguerite Pilven, curator and art critic member AICA