Bøker av Arnaud Lajeunie

FLOWERS doesn't represent flowers. They are explicitly flowers, as per the title, but flowers reduced to the mere forms, on which spray paint and kid's glue can be dumped. They stand reconfigured, their stems artificially grafted together via Serflex, blu-tack or wires. They are an aggregation of materials, textures and colors, a composite greater than the sum of its parts. These (mostly supermarket) flowers end up being transformed into a pile of stuff to disarm the immediate perception of their very nature. Forms are made difficult to increase the length of perception, to delay the understanding of what is seen. It's a stratagem to create a thin breach, through which can arise a visual pleasure unrelated to any 'what' of any object. It is a loose approach on a constantly evolving, reconfigured, half intentionally and half accidentally produced image, where instability is designed from the start. All these forms are improvised, transient, and modifiable. The structures always collapse, but instead of rebuilding what was there, the novel composition is taken as a new starting point. There is no program, no origin, no end: only a continual uncertainty, an accepted precariousness which imposes permanent reconfigurations until boredom surfaces, then: stop and edit. The edited images are never the actualization of pre-existing mental images. They are discoveries rather than inventions, the result of constant negotiations. The aim is a visual pleasure unrelated to any-thing, as ultimately, FLOWERS doesn't represent flowers.

MUD is an ongoing collaboration between Arnaud Lajeunie and Georgia Pendlebury. For five years they have photographed girls cast online from all over Europe. The girls are strangers to one another. Lajeunie and Pendlebury seek to study the behaviour between them as their relationships develop within this artificially created situation. The first four volumes from this evolving body of work are now published by Art Paper Editions. The fifth volume is due to be shot later this year.