Whatever This May Be is Laurent Le Deunff’s sixth exhibition at Semiose. The gallery space is transformed into a white landscape, inhabited by figurative sculptures made of both ‘real’ and ‘fake’ wood, set on plinths or placed directly on the floor.

The title of the exhibition, Whatever This May Be refers to the controversy surrounding Constantin Brancusi’s successful lawsuit against the American Customs Service, which attempted to apply import duty to his sculptures—in principle exempt as works of art—when they were transported to the USA for an exhibition in the 1920s. At the heart of this dispute was the sculpture Bird in Space, which customs officials considered to be an industrially manufactured object rather than work of art. This was precisely the kind of anecdote that provides inspiration for Laurent Le Deunff, who practices sculpture as an art of artifice and carefully cultivated illusion.

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, seahorses or 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 Biennale Gherdëina, Val Gardena, Dolomites (IT), at Portique, Le Havre (FR), at MASC, Sables d’Olonne (FR), at MRAC Occitanie, Sérignan (FR), at La Halle des Bouchers, Vienne (FR), at Carré Scène nationale, Château-Gontier (FR), at Artspace Boan, Séoul (KR), at Museum Beelden aan Zee, La Haye (NL), at PAV Parco Arte Vivente, Turin (IT), at LAMAG, Municipal Art Gallery, Los Angeles (US), at MOCO, Montpellier (FR), at Musée d’Art Moderne Paris (FR) and at numerous FRAC. Laurent Le Deunff’s work is held in the collections of the Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris (FR), MRAC Occitanie, Sérignan (FR), CAPC, Bordeaux (FR), and in the collections of the FRAC of Paris, Bordeaux, Limoges and Caen (FR).