Laurent Le Deunff

Laurent Le Deunff’s sculptures often mislead the eye due to the disparity between the materials used and the objects represented. He has a pronounced taste for traditional techniques from the world of arts and crafts as well as decorative artifices. The modesty of papier-mâché and fingernail clippings rubs shoulders with the nobility of bronze and deer antlers, and the rarity of fossilized dinosaur droppings sits side-by-side with the ordinariness of fake wood made from cement. Le Deunff’s meticulousness and acute sense of observation have also been deployed in his series of drawings—copulating animals, the footprints of imaginary monsters or artist’s cats—through which he explores animality, in a narrative that leaves plenty of space for the imagination. His bestiary brings together a wide variety of creatures—dolphins, slugs, moles seahorses and bears—without any hint of hierarchy of species. Humans are not excluded from the narrative, which reactivates a kind of archetypal primitivism: a prehistoric phallus and various totems and talismans transport civilization back to its most splendid origins.

His works have been the subject of exhibitions at La Halle des Bouchers, Vienne (FR), at Carré Scène nationale, Château-Gontier (FR), at Frac Île-de-France, Paris (FR), at Frac Normandie Caen (FR), at MOCO, Montpellier (FR), at Frac Poitou-Charentes, Angoulême (FR), at FRAC Nouvelle Aquitaine MÉCA, Bordeaux (FR), at MRAC Occitanie, Sérignan (FR) and at Musée d’Art Moderne Paris (FR). Laurent Le Deunff's work is held in the collections of the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (FR), MRAC Occitanie, Sérignan (FR), CAPC, Bordeaux (FR), Frac Île-de-France, Paris (FR), Frac Nouvelle-Aquitaine MÉCA, Bordeaux (FR), Frac-Artothèque Nouvelle Aquitaine, Limoges (FR) and Frac Normandie Caen (FR).