Laurent Perbos

Born in 1971 in Bordeaux, Laurent Perbos lives and works in Marseille.

He is a graduate of the Bordeaux School of Art.

Since his first pieces, the artist has not deviated from the treatment of form, which does not, however, prevail over the purpose of his sculptures. Certainly, the work of Laurent Perbos is articulated around the form and the matter. These two components are treated one and the other as an end in itself, a plastic purpose. A harmony of proportions, a concern for the intrinsic plastic qualities of the materials he uses, all accentuated by a charter of pop colors, acidulous, which recall those used by the toy industry.
The works of Laurent Perbos are in the pure tradition of assembly, widely used by the new realists. It is an artistic approach "which does not sulk its pleasure", which assumes its aesthetic side because it is not limited to that. Even if his sculptures would not tell anything else, the aesthetic pleasure would already be a sufficient experience, because this one is as much an experience of art as an experience of itself... But the recourse to the assembly advocates the use of existing objects to return the reality of their time. Thus, the artist operates a curious mixture between the real, that of the objects of the everyday life and the marvelous, the references to the myth, to the fable. Laurent Perbos uses the object as a basic compositional element, a kind of used plastic vocabulary. Heir to the ready-made, he reuses a manufactured object (garden hose, bungee cord, tennis ball) and imposes a new purpose on it. Thus it is not only the form that is found at the service of something else, but the place that the object occupied in the popular collective unconscious.

Often, the exhibitions of Laurent Perbos are built like an initiatory tale. One evolves in an imaginary world, in which the objects take life thanks to the counter-use that the artist inflicts to them. He uses symbolic or allegorical images like the rainbow, the tree, or a mythological character and invents a story for them. It is this story that implies a feeling and in fact operates a personification of the subject. Laurent Perbos plays on ideas, on representations... He uses literary or poetic processes, like oxymoron, metaphor and creates ambivalent images as well mental as visual. The fall of the elements is one of the most poetic examples.

Céline Ghisleri, 2010