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GALERIE LOUIS GENDRE, CHAMALIÈRES, FRANCE, 2016

Nothing in common.

For this exhibition, Louis Gendre and Mariko Kuroda chose sculptures that were more than twenty years old along with other just completed ones whose idea they liked. All are exhibited in France for the first time.
Gilles T. Lacombe then constructed a baroque dialogue between a rather unusual mega-assembly and the large bourgeois house with polished floors in which the gallery is located.

What is it that triggers the impression of seeing something new that emanates from this installation, even though it is made up of familiar objects? Does it come from the unlikely pairings it presents, such as the association of a billiards table and a piano? Or It is caused by the droll or enigmatic, if not to say disturbing, narratives that these curious combinations generate?
Gilles T. Lacombe is equally fond of making things with whatever he lays his hands on and of inventing fictions in which the objects that invade our worlds are transformed into mementos to recent history, or to the history yet to come.
He undertakes an almost obsessive accounting of matter to come to the aid of the fragile imperfection of memory.

Il se méfie de la création spontanée. Chacune des œuvres est le résultat d’une longue décantation faite d’ajouts, de repentirs, d’essais, de découvertes. À chaque fois, cela commence par une évidence : celle d’un premier dessin sur un pauvre bout de papier, celle d’une forme « juste » trouvée en pliant une chambre à air ou en s’intéressant aux disques de tronçonneuse ; ensuite, il y a la transformation de la matière, qui prend un temps si long que les pensées affluent, saugrenues, agressives, jubilatoires. Quand le hasard intervient, c’est lors de cette seconde étape, qui fait émerger des choses que l’artiste ignorait, qu’il associe dans des raccourcis saisissants.

He is suspicious of spontaneous creation. Each work is the result of a long decantation made up of additions, renouncements, attempts and discoveries. Each time, it starts with something obvious: an initial drawing on a scrap of paper, an “apt” form found by bending a bicycle tube or by focusing on circular saw blades; then there is the transformation of matter, which takes such a long time that thoughts pour out – absurd, aggressive and jubilant. When chance gets involved, it is during this second phase, bringing out things the artist was unaware of, which he associates in startling short-circuited connections.
While there in an underlying gravity to the play of words, this stems from a morality of elegance. Often forgotten along the way, these thoughts remain inscribed in the sculpture they have nourished. This is why the exhibition invites each visitor, in turn, to concoct his own cogitation mixing intuitions, formal flights of fancy, sedimentation of sensations and unexpected reflections.

> See the Gilles T. Lacombe exhibition at the Louis Gendre Gallery

> See the article Le sculpteur Gilles T Lacombe à la galerie L. Gendre in La Montagne