Laurent Muller - All is Vanity

About

All is Vanity is inspired by the baroque world of the Cathedral of Saint John in Valletta, the great place of worship built by the Knights of the Order of St John of Malta. The floor of the cathedral, covered with four hundred tombstones made of intricate inlaid pieces of marble, constitutes the leitmotiv of the show. In this new body of works, Laurent Muller continues to embrace the link between the materiality of images and the symbolism of objects and their meanings. Between 2004 and 2006, Muller developed his series of tracings of the floor. Muller then stylises and transfers the data into vectors by means of digital technology. A group of vivid compositions is born (with Benitoh, the skeleton in briefs, as the main protagonist) and several experimental poetic design pieces take shape. The decomposition of an image and the consequent restoration of a meta-language are a reflection of the fragility and temporality of the human condition and a symbol of its vanity. From flesh to stone, from volume to line, is Vanity an ode to life, or merely the relentless obsession of Time? What is to be remembered or engraved in marble? How long before the invisible takes over the tangible? When do we dare to see, touch and transform? These are the type of questions Muller asks us in his first multidisciplinary London show.