Matthieu Laurette

’By turning the laws of marketing and the mass media to his advantage, Matthieu Laurette incorporates his work within a strategy of infiltration and redistribution. In 1993, he established his artistic birth certificate by taking part in a TV game called Tournez manège (The Dating Game) where the female presenter asked him who he was, to which he replied: ‘A multimedia artist’.’
(Pascal Beausse, La Biennale di Venezia, Cat., 2001)

Laurette’s ‘studio’ is what could be called the ‘commercial public space’: the supermarket, the press, television, etc., in short, any zone where interest or need is marketed.

With a good eye for readymade metaphors and for suitable products and phenomena in the commercial domain, he analyses the mechanisms of the economic system and measures their effect on art and man. As an artist, he usually operates in the guise of an economic actor – a consumer or a manufacturer – in order to test and question the system from the inside, or even to shape it to his will. In the process, Matthieu Laurette investigates both the role of the buyer/spectator or entrepreneur and the role of the artist. In other words, he questions the identity of the consumer as an artist, and vice versa. And he finds new answers.

It is especially this far-reaching integration of his work into social and commercial life, the near-merger of his work with economic reality, that makes the oeuvre of Matthieu Laurette so remarkable. This quality causes works by Laurette to generate a multitude of reflections on the interplay between consumption, in all its forms, and art. It lends it a symbolic and often problematic nature. Another important aspect of Matthieu Laurette’s oeuvre is his use of the medium of television, which Laurette turns into a kind of virtual studio. Moreover, through television, his artist’s career itself is turned into a direct product.
Technically speaking, Laurette could be called a ‘multimedia’ artist, or a conceptual pop-artist. But his installations and objects are often the result of a production process which is merely started up or guided by him. In other words, he seldom intervenes as a ‘maker’: the actual work consists of an association or recombination of existing products or objects manufactured by ‘third parties’. The evolution of our market system leads to a constant divergence and cross-fertilisation of ideas. Laurette’s work attempts to find, in this ever-changing economic context, a survival strategy for art and for man.

Short Biography

Matthieu Laurette has made exhibitions and projects with and in a.o. PS1/MoMA, N.Y, Kunstverein Frankfurt, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Prix Ricard, MNAM-Centre Pompidou Paris, ICA London, Palais de Tokyo Paris, Artsonje Center Seoul, CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain Bordeaux, Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Castello di Rivoli Torino, 49th Venice Biennale (2001), Arc-Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, De Appel Amsterdam, Mamco-Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva, Casco Projects Utrecht, Guggenheim Museum Soho, New York. He received the RICARD S.A. Award for the most representative artist under 40 y.o. in the French scene in 2003.