Jérémy Laffon

Jérémy Laffon was born in 1978 in Limoges (FR), he lives and works Marseille (FR)

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis[1]

“At last, the old master sorcerer has stepped out! And now it’s my turn to command his spirits; I’ve observed his words and deeds, I’ve memorized his spell, and with the power of my mind, I too shall work wonders[2].”

The sorcerer’s apprentice claims the right to occupy the empty seat—not merely a sidekick, but a Master Player in action. Disorder appears as an aesthetic, bouncing like a ball, a wild morality, a plastic spirit as malleable as chewing gum[3], often playful and infra-thin. He follows the rules of a singular paralogical drift, working according to the principles of a kind of “unworking.” The artistic act casts the trivial in a mythological light. Actions compile into chronicles of joyful knowledge—fragments of the everyday that are trivial yet always delightful. Happening and happyning.

The slippage, come and become, the Ping and Pong of his cosmology, means that the sorcerer’s apprentice is lost in a world beyond him, and at the same time, seeks to go beyond his experience of that world in order to lose it. Life and art, as they say. Reconciling life and art is something as totalitarian as reality. Being whimsical becomes a principle of individuation. The artistic approach alters the space of representation to invent passages and passwords. No one reigns supreme anymore, the time of the Master Player moves back and forth.

To work does not mean to exploit the real, but to compose and animate with a poetic guerrilla warfare of the domestic, the familiar, the mechanical, the customary—a test of uses subjected to the senselessness and the exhausted forces of the everyday. The perpetual motion (of objects, of machines for seeing, of concepts, supports, formats) is the true power of the sorcerer’s apprentice, as a labyrinth of thought and an aesthetic canon. A performative culture. A mechanism not always controlled or measurable, because if play (his Dada) is always possible, it means that the play of the “I” is so too, and also the play of the play—and that eventually it ends up being dis(pla)ced. And the play of the play of the play…

Text by Luc Jeand’heur, 2010

[1] Oxford English Dictionary: “a factitious word alleged to mean ‘a lung disease caused by the inhalation of very fine silica dust, causing inflammation in the lungs.’” A made-up word coined and defined solely to beat the record for longest word. It resonates like a magic spell.
[2] Goethe, translated by Henri Blaze, 1863.
[3] Once derived from latex, chewing gum may improve concentration and elevate mood, though when consumed in large quantities, it has a laxative effect.