Raw Landscapes

Iseult Labote photographs construction sites, seeking poetry and aesthetic sublimation in industrial materials on construction sites. Iseult Labote also sculpts.

Using cement, sand, and pigments—fundamental materials—she forms bases, like small poured concrete slabs, onto which fragments of slate, asphalt, and drill cores are attached. She constructs and proposes a world, or several worlds in the making. This series of sculptures presents itself as a series of small play scenes with miniaturized decor. These spaces can equally evoke a terrestrial, marine, or lunar environment, belonging to the past, present, or future. With their primordial foundations, these sculptures are like archaeological models, brutalist architectural projects, or projections of a world in the making. They are nourished and loaded with research characterizing the artist’s work, which questions the landscapes and environments that humans construct and deconstruct, and in which they are born, evolve and die.

They also perhaps seek to reveal the expressive power of the mineral, whether industrial or natural, which always knows how to clothe itself in the solemnity of eternity. Faced with this series, the viewer can become the witness of fragments, of relics of the past which seek to transmit their history through the rock. He can also take on the role of the demiurge, having the power to see and imagine simultaneously the future of different possible worlds, through the forms which detach themselves from the magma of the bases to rise. Following a process of appearance then of blossoming, the most brilliant civilizations dominated and sculpted the world to their advantage before disappearing. However, disappearance is not necessarily followed by oblivion and, the stone as the work of Iseult Labote reminds us, speaks to the one who looks at it.

Sometimes a Zen garden with a sand base, sometimes the erection of menhirs or an alignment of Easter Island statues, these sculptures highlight what unites humans across time and space, through an inert material that can nevertheless become the vehicle for spiritual reflection. Resonating with her series of sculptures, the artist develops a body of landscape photography. The photographs combine outdoor shots in existing natural spaces with close-ups taken precisely on the sculpted models. Although the rock appears immutable, Iseult Labote’s images highlight the relativity of our visual understanding and the power of deceptive appearances. The media filter of photography becomes a new layer of the mise en abyme initiated by the sculptures.

Thus, the question of reality, its validity, its relativity, and the capacity of humans to perceive it, is raised here. The artist’s approach and research pushes and pushes back the definition of reality to open up a field of reflection starting, here, from what is before our eyes, the most concrete materiality of stone.