Martin Laborde

Martin Laborde was born in 1983 in France, he lives and works in Lisbon (PT)

“Martin Laborde is in pursuit of something like beauty, even if it is hidden in grime and chaos. He privileges the accuracy of a relationship over any notion of finish, asserting that precision does not necessarily lie in the appearance of completion. What we see before us makes clear that something crooked can still be right. And in that, a kind of reduction occurs. What draws our gaze is not the trace of an enigmatic narrative—though such a narrative is always present at the origin of the process, setting in motion its own particular story—nor the poverty of the materials, which is merely circumstantial, the most direct path toward his ends. What captivates instead is the subtlety in the relationships between forms and colors, which resonates with the overall movement and reveals a kind of poetics: the chosen means of constructing, of giving these objects a certain quality of presence.

In saying this, I leave aside the drawings, which deserve their own words. Not because they are isolated from the rest, but because they follow their own dynamic. Taking the form of a continuous flow, they seek the same point of balance through the paradoxical means of a movement that appears disordered. They are at times proposals for volumes, at other times graphic encounters or image manipulations. In their multiplicity, they serve to define a field of action while constantly opening it up. As such, we can read them as a programmatic space, but one whose program is always shifting, thus giving us the general shape of the whole: a centrifugal movement in constant search of balance, the pursuit of a suspension of time that calls for the storm.”

Text by Emile Vappereau, 2009.