Bertrand Lamarche Swallowed Solo Show September 28th - October 26th, 2024
For Swallowed, his fourth solo exhibition at GaleriePoggi, Bertrand Lamarche proposes a scenography that might recall the aesthetics of spectacle and event production: his tripods, cables, and projectors create a setting that paradoxically evokes a backstage environment while simultaneously transforming the space into a kind of kaleidoscope or optical machine. Swallowed borrows its architectural motifs from modeling but multiplies them into a kind of general visual feedback loop. The exhibition features three newreal-time video installations along with a selection of recent films. Engulfed in darkness, the space appears punctured by windows opening onto a "city," where facades, filmed from a low angle, are animated by large illuminated signs evoking megacities, their promises, and their legends. Each installation consists of an architectural model topped with a motorized sign. These models are filmed live, and their image, projected onto itself, creates aluminous distortion and a mise en abyme effect on the projection screen, where the shadow of the model is also cast. These signs, without an obvious destination, display a series of enigmatic texts or words that evoke psychological states, bodily sensations, or an introspective dizziness.
Bertrand Lamarche was born in 1966 in Paris. Since the early 1990s, he has developed a multifaceted body of work centered around various recurring objects or movements, embracing both an emotional and contemplative approach as well as a more narrative or analytical structure. By implementing a series of amplification systems, loops, mises en abyme, and modeling, Bertrand Lamarche’s works create a sensory, dramatic, or dizzying experience through effects that draw as much from optical phenomena as from the artifices and techniques of cinema history. His work regularly invokes a set of motifs or figures such as meteorology, refrains, urban planning andindustry, giant umbellifers, black holes, or genre cinema. It is characterized by a form of autonomy and potentiality through the use of machinery, staged in various scenarios developed in pieces that range from architectural models to installations, performances, or videos. Lamarche’s work exists within its own unique temporality, functioning as an elastic collage gradually influenced by different visual or historical references, from the specter of Klossowski’s Baphomet to the shadow of Joséphine Baker, Jean Epstein, science fiction, or the voice of Kate Bush, with attention to the movement of a phonograph, the urban imagery of the post-war economic boom, the meteorology of Camille Flammarion, or the skyline of the city of Nancy.