The Photography of Alain Laframboise:
Art History’s Wunderkammer

Alain Laframboise’s photos evoke a skilful combination of realms through their use of shadows and their delicate play of light. Sculpture, painting, the discourses of art and photography are intertwined in visual compositions that are — at the same time — microspheres of art history. Using miniature objects as a basic element of his artistic practice, the artist sets the stage with figurines and small-scale props that, while not parodying ordinary reality, often raise questions about art history as part of what might be called a visual reverie. The photographed objects resemble statuettes and create tiny still lives, genre scenes largely covered in shadow and invaded by blackness. In his early years Laframboise produced scenic tableaux in boxes of various sizes that questioned Western art by deconstructing the two-dimensional surface, or by rendering pictorial space theatrical. These three-dimensional collages gradually gave way to photographs. Since 1989, the latter practice has provided the artist with a chance to devise points of view and compositions only accessible to viewers via this medium. Laframboise conducts his artistic research using three-dimensional montages and photos exploring representational modalities, in which the miniature object itself is the spearhead. In his last exhibition at Graff Gallery1 1  - Parcours, presented at Graff Gallery from February 7 to March 8, 2008. he presented a series of landscapes barely free of a penumbra that seemed to mask and conceal the objects that only occasionally emerged from total darkness. His figurative stagings operated in dialogue with Renaissance art theory; more specifically, with the precepts of Leon Battista Alberti, put forward in his De pictura in 1435. This work advocated for a new pictorial order manifest in the narrative components of painting; through invention (inventio), the depicted scene becomes both the object of a narration or description, and of a composition made possible by the arrangement of forms and body parts — an istoria. Each of the photos reveals a “micro” art history by making the miniature objects simultaneously fragments and privileged motifs. The objects pose a renewed challenge to Alberti’s great paradigms: perspective, and the notion of painting as a window open onto the world. The scenography of the miniature object, therefore, cleaves to a photographic account of art history. 

The small objects in the photographs are positioned — for the most part — in a non-space, one free of historical and geographical reference points, or other forms of identification. There are few indications of scale and the apprehension of the subject is largely arrived at by contrast. In The flower grows, an old man dies, the different light intensities produce a range of silver grey tones, creating an emerald-toned light. The image achieves its pictoriality not only due to variations of light and darkness, but also through the circulation of volumes marked by a proffered hand, open in an ambiguous gesture: offering or asking something of us. These object portraits recall the pictorial techniques of Venetian portraits from the first half of the sixteenth century. One recognizes the deployment of formless, sombre backgrounds from works by Titian, Antonello da Messina and Giorgione. The practice foregrounds an aesthetic of purity and heightens formal ambiguities. One can speak therefore of a deliberate mystification of the image and of its power to choose the way it will be perceived as a function of its construction. Nonetheless, these object portraits also seem to favour the ideal of the Mannerist artists, with which Laframboise is well acquainted by virtue of his years teaching art history. Through a taste for metaphor, rhetorical trope and scholarly citation, the staging of art history in the photographic arrangement of miniature objects positions itself as part of a search for an istoria a minima, the supreme model of painting according to Alberti. The istoria, a composition of figures engaged in an activity, here finds itself diverted towards the vegetable and mineral kingdoms. The scene set is a story of stone figures whose miniaturization blurs the boundaries between materials: thus, the photographed body offers an ideal passage between living model and still life. In Sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet… love… a stone foetus plays with this sort of indetermination. In a similar way the viewer questions the material in My eyes adored you… — is it a wax effigy, a mineral face, a death mask? Or is it implicitly a story about petrifaction? What is the status of a being — not to say a dream — made of stone, the living transported to the mineral ­kingdom? The shift of kingdoms lies at the root of the art — and the eye — of both photographer and Medusa; they have the power to petrify. Here is one characteristic quality of the Mannerist artist: to work with textures and colours metaphorically, while suggesting connivance, as if it were, above all else, important to affirm an aptitude for ingenium, the art of ingenious thought expressed with grace and precision, allowing us, in this case, to liken the work of the photographer to Freud’s Witz, or word play.