Guillaume Lavrut

Laser-cut wall angles, white mist from which emerge the spires of the Eiffel Tower or Sacré-Cœur Basilica rising from a dream, an accordion staircase frozen in a low-angle shot... What a strange universe Guillaume Lavrut has created. His luminous images seem disconnected from time. Is it morning, evening, or afternoon? The expected roughness of reality vanishes into a sweet, almost saccharine chromaticism. The city, scrubbed clean by color and light, emerges without rough edges. It appears almost artificial, like a French version of The Truman Show.

In “Lignes de fuite” (Vanishing Lines), characters are rare, captured like miniature figurines in a polished setting where accidents seem impossible. And yet... Lavrut sometimes introduces suspicion, the imperceptible discomfort of a disturbing strangeness, if not a shift in the perception of familiar places, opening the door to new motionless journeys.

What a delight it is to discover, in Paris, as if for the first time, a garden in the Tuileries, walked through a thousand times but never seen like this before. The sharply cut oval water basin, around which passersby sit patiently, could correspond to the vision of a gardener's paradise, seen from above. Could it be that of a hidden god amused by these figures frozen in the torpor of eternal idleness?

Guillaume Lavrut wanders through the city, moving around like a hunter of images, identifying with this quote from Robert Capa: “The photos are there. All you have to do is take them.” The connection between the two is deeper than it seems, however. Lavrut poaches visual objects hidden in reality that no one else detects: the curve of a lamppost, the orange of a traffic light, the geometry of a tennis court or a cluster of umbrellas, or even the glare of car bodies illuminated by headlights... Everything is there, like a visual “ready-made” that he simply has to record.

Text: Thierry Grillet