Laurent Faulon

Born in 1969 in Nevers (France), he lives in Geneva.

Whether he is literally wallowing like a pig in cakes set on the floor, going into his Parents' bedroom to put on a wild performance on the family bed, or organizing a barbecue with sofas roasting on the spit in a stench of dung, the artist Laurent Faulon cultivates a violent, animal, alarming radicalness, and plunges the onlooker at his installations into a thoroughly uncomfortable world. Well removed from the ambient good taste and the artistic landscape currently predominant.

What is your artistic proposition in the Hôtel-Dieu?

In the chapel: Auréole/Halo, 2008, installation. A machine for cleaning floors, on a leash held by a steel cable, revolves in the middle of the chapel. The upkeep product has been replaced by cognac, which draws a brown halo on the linoleum tiling. A trivial association of spirituality and spirits, this “halo” appears in a world imbued with hygienist obsessions and patrimonial hysteria. Old alcohol and old stones, power-cleaned by the free-market economy, find their place in a prosperous leisure culture which pretends not to know that Saint-Marc is a detergent.
In the pilgrims' room: Désirons sans fin/Endless desire, 2008, installation. A garden room, a tree trunk, a leather sofa, a waste container, a cubic metre of breeze block, a large TV screen... all are made unreachable because of a thick coat of Vaseline covering them. Witnesses of an average purchasing power and shared aspirations, these objects are exposed to our envy, and refuse to be owned by us. The pomade they are covered with renders them uniform and anaesthetizes them. Their doughy shininess attracts us or repels us. The tree becomes as desirable and disgusting as the plastic table, the sofa, the large screen, and the waste bin where we toss it all. A world frozen in the fat of our desires, unfit for consumption. Napkins are nevertheless available for those who will give it a try.

What does the dictum “Wherever I am going, I am already there” do for you?

It's absolutely impossible that I'm there already. Especially in Toulouse, it has to be someone else. Someone who looks like me, perhaps, and is trying to imitate me. All I have to do is turn up and he'll be unmasked.

What does art enable you to do?

Listen to the sounds of a washing machine for four hours on the trot, raise a pig, order 40 cream puffs réligieuses, at the local pastry shop, buy 10 white moulded plastic garden tables, wear red sneakers, recycle 42 fridges in working order... all helping me to communicate with fridge and washing machine repairers, pork eaters and pastry eaters, purchasers of garden tables and people wearing red sneakers... So many irreal, mimetic gestures which make a poetic crack in the triviality of my domestic life. Art helps me to make gestures and adopt necessary and frivolous patterns of behaviour, which I would never otherwise find the motivation for.