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Lot Essay
'I spend entire days making life-size replicas of the objects I abhor' (V. Carron, quoted in A. Jasper, 'Alpine Aesthetics and Modernism; Imitation and a Boar's head', Frieze, no. 107, May 2007, p. 136).
Embodying Valentin Carron's dictum his seminal work, L'Homme, reproduces Alberto Giacometti's original L'homme qui marche (Walking Man)- once an ambassador for High Modernism but now an overexposed and imitated kitsch object. Via the mechanisms of replication, Carron places himself in an art historical trajectory that includes Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol and Elaine Sturtevant. Much like Warhol's Brillo Boxes, L'homme takes on a mass-produced aesthetic but is actually handmade, subverting the processes of Kitsch once more it brings the object in full circle from aesthetic refugee back to an emissary work of art.
Carron's impressively crafted sculptures articulate and confront national identity, the vernacular and appropriation. Attesting to the immense power of his formal language, Carron represented Switzerland at the 55th Venice Biennale.
Embodying Valentin Carron's dictum his seminal work, L'Homme, reproduces Alberto Giacometti's original L'homme qui marche (Walking Man)- once an ambassador for High Modernism but now an overexposed and imitated kitsch object. Via the mechanisms of replication, Carron places himself in an art historical trajectory that includes Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol and Elaine Sturtevant. Much like Warhol's Brillo Boxes, L'homme takes on a mass-produced aesthetic but is actually handmade, subverting the processes of Kitsch once more it brings the object in full circle from aesthetic refugee back to an emissary work of art.
Carron's impressively crafted sculptures articulate and confront national identity, the vernacular and appropriation. Attesting to the immense power of his formal language, Carron represented Switzerland at the 55th Venice Biennale.