As part of the Circulation(s) Festival, the gallery Les filles du calvaire invited Laurent Lacotte to invest the window on the street. He condenses in three photographs the figures that mark his imagination.
Three pillars structure the exhibition: the space has a triangular architecture - this is how Plutarch defines any new sanctuary, with a geometric shape that testifies to the stability, cohesion and harmony of the divine bond. It is however to a human exploration, too human even, that Laurent Lacotte opens, because the figures summoned here all resemble situations of loss, of going off course, of derailment.
The most urgent and most current of them stare at us from the other side of the Mediterranean. In Nice, during an exploratory visit prior to the exhibition Go Canny! at the Villa Arson, the artist spotted a solitary reproduction of the Statue of Liberty on the Promenade des Anglais scanning the foggy horizon. Draping it with a survival blanket, he underlines with a crumpled gold the current weakness of this guardian, who has ended up adopting, according to a disturbing mimicry, the ornaments of those who try to flee beyond the seas. A lighthouse struggling to dispel the fog of a world in distress, GUARD stands out as well at the beginning of a history of migrations as at the end of a European logic that no longer manages to rekindle its torch.
From this falling night, which apparently no owl crosses, seems to emerge a sign indicating a small town : FRANCE.
The image strikes by its proximity to the great tradition of suspense films, those of Hitchcock or Georges Franju: in the thickness of the darkness, the headlights only blindly cut out a country road, finally a word appears, the indication of finally finding oneself somewhere safe. An illusory feeling: we know the rest of the story, since it happens again and again, that each time the refuge is a shelter from nothing, that on the contrary, the sordid misadventure of disintegrated heroes takes place there. This is France.