Description
Monolithe, by Laurent Henrion, is a dense book with soft, light images. The weight of the very thick, tar-black hardcover, a flood of shapes on the page. This essentially baroque work explores the irregular pearls of desire. There is darkness and troubled light, soap bubbles and wire fences against which flesh collides.
Constellations, the inside is the outside, the outside is the inside, we do not desire alone but with the universe, the crooked roads, the cube of mystery where our soul rests. Monolithe folds and unfolds, looks at transcendent geometric lines, retaining walls, buttresses. It is the choreography of characters in search of an author – of love? – tilting their heads, necks stretched, baptismal liquids flowing down their faces. Laurent Henrion does not dissociate the small point of brilliance from the sensation of the cosmos, inventing his work by connecting masculine and feminine energies.
The joy of polarities, solitude, immensity, flowers open with the scent of lust. The impression of sculptural bodies entering into mutability, metamorphosis, reinvention of the self. Tides, waterfalls, falls, whirlpools, births.
Desire is blind, but Monolithe sees, organises, assembles, finds coherence, recurrences, points of divergence. Everything is silent, but everything speaks.
Lines like tears. Shards on a mirror. Spectral embraces. Laurent Henrion’s work can only be approached through poetry, for it is mist and darkened light, Corinthian columns and erratic swimming in the flow of time.
Barbed wire of plants, softness of skin, apotropaic gestures thrown into space. Each photograph is a strange and fascinating tableau, halos of light in flight, amniotic fluid of the night, sparks of sexual attraction.
In Laurent Henrion’s realm, there are abandoned houses in the woods, huts becoming temples, a bet on grace to get through the times and their evil spells.
We do not leave Monolithe, we belong to it.