Work from the Collection

Laocoon

Artist: Etienne Bossut
Date: 2005
Medium: Moulding
Materials: Resin, Clear gel coat
Collection: Lafayette anticipations - Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin
The titles of Etienne Bossut’s works are essential to their understanding. Carefully chosen, they play with forms and language by referring to the history of art or cinema. They are clues to help us see. The title Laocoon refers to the famous Greek sculpture whose Roman copy is kept in the Vatican Museums: it represents a Trojan priest and his two sons writhing in pain, suffocated by a gigantic sea serpent. Here, the father and his sons have disappeared: only the snake remains and, without its prey, it coils around the void. The accumulation of identical casts of seat and the use of a translucent resin with an organic character give the impression that it is only the slough of a snake or a gigantic insect—caterpillar or millipede—monstrous yet full of grace and poetry. Etienne Bossut proceeds here to a distanced imitation which displaces and transforms the original subject, but through moulding, he indicates that what we are looking at is not the original object—a chair—but its image, its history, that of sculpture and art as a whole.

Text written by Marianne Tricoire as part of the partnership between the École du Louvre and Lafayette Anticipations – Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin.

Exhibitions

Sculpter (faire à l'atelier)
FRAC Bretagne, Rennes (France)
from 14 Mar to 27 May 2018
POP UP Truck
Galeries Lafayette, Paris (France)
from 03 Jun to 04 Jun 2016
Laocoon(s)
Musée Rodin, Paris, ()
from 15 Oct 2008 to 22 Feb 2009
P2P - Peer to peer
Casino Luxembourg, Luxembourg (Luxembourg)
from 26 Jan to 06 Apr 2008
Antidote 3
La Galerie des Galeries, Paris (France)
from 13 Sep to 03 Nov 2007
"One"
Galerie Espace MICA, Rennes (France)
from 2007 to
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