Press release
Concerned about contemporary social and artistic issues, Studio 21bis explores the landscapes associated with public and institutional space. The tandem Laurent Lacotte and Romain Demongeot echoed his environmental, cultural and existential thoughts in cardboard, his favorite material. A poor and abandoned material, that the artists are recovering and recycling in huts and other ephemeral and fragile devices, questioning our relationship to habitat, as well as to public and private spheres.
Interweaving art and life, the creative process plays with architectural symbols and codes related to housing. As he performs with temporary structures in Paris, as well as in Lyon or London, Studio 21bis questions the collective imagination. As «Swimming in troubled waters», his latest project, where shark fin in cardboard do the extension of the Esplanade de La Defense in Paris.
Those temporary sculptures are doomed to destruction, either by the hand of man or by the weather. Remains of those works are recorded through a single photography.
«To be continued ...», the first intervention by Studio 21bis in Galerie Dix9, is a continuation of his artistic process. The exhibition focuses on “Girouette” (‘‘Weather vane’’), a new architectural piece, surrounded by photographs of past works.
Studio 21bis plays as usual with the ambiguity on the symbols linked to the traditional “girouette” put on roofs to indicate the wind.
«To be continued ...» is a new step in Studio 21bis’s works, a philosophy of giving up and ephemeral, a language that questions the “reification” of art works.