Fabienne Lasserre

Fabienne Lasserre

Remember high school physics class? At some point, you put a ball on top of a ramp, a few feet above the floor. Before releasing it, you’re supposed to calculate how far it will fly before it hits the ground. Now imagine that on top of the ramp you have an unfamiliar object: maybe it’s alive, maybe not. It’s not quite round, nor is it square, the shape and weight are hard to define. You can’t be sure if it will roll, bounce, crawl, or perhaps just flap some part of itself and fly to the ceiling. Welcome to the world of Fabienne Lasserre.

Lasserre makes indeterminate objects. She uses materials like felt, ceramic chain, paint, hair, linen and wool. Her art evokes certain kinds of adjectives: lumpy, bulbous, twisted, warped, folded, irregular, slack, droopy, precarious. For the most part, her sculpture is not mimetic; it doesn’t look like a house or a flower – it just looks like itself. Yet her sculptures frequently evoke aspects of the natural world: things that grow, things that drip, things with tendrils. Many of the things Lasserre dreams up seem like they could move, like a seashell you discover is a hermit crab when it suddenly scuttles away. Even works that are clearly inanimate appear ready to spontaneously twist or roll.

Taking yielding materials and making objects that are a little disheveled, lumpen, and a bit off-balance, Lasserre establishes a firm position in contradistinction to artists of shiny commodities, like Jeff Koons, or artists of enormous gestures, like Richard Serra. Lasserre’s work does not seduce, command, awe, or intimidate. These are abstract objects that manage to achieve a figural presence; they occupy the world like we do, and we are free to engage each piece and see what we can learn. Like individual people, Lasserre’s works resist definitions and categories. Go meet them.

Image:Gallery Diet Installation, Fabienne LasserreProfile by Daniel Gerwin