ALBAN LANORE / French, born in 1966
WORKS
CAREER
Alban Lanore was born in Paris in 1966. He lives and works in the countryside, away from the art world. Here, he is free to develop a body of work that defies fashion. He defines himself as a self-taught artist. It was his travels and encounters that gave him a vocation for sculpture.
After designing and producing sets for amusement parks, in 1991 he set up a plant decor company, which led him to travel the world. In 1998, a trip to Gabon changed his life, both artistically and ethically. Stunned by the beauty and richness of the forests, Alban drew inspiration for a completely different way of working, which he put into practice on his return to Paris. After Gabon, it was the Amazon rainforest, and in particular the logging concessions, that he regularly prospected to recover only the scraps.
His career as a sculptor has been marked by a number of important encounters. As a teenager, he crossed paths with Jean-Jacques Popille, well known to art brut enthusiasts, then Frans Krajcberg, ardent defender of nature conservation and author with Pierre Restany of the “Manifesto of integral naturalism”, who encouraged him in his approach. Finally, the sculptor Vincent Batbedat provided him with research into constructed art. Over the years, this teaching has steered his organic work towards purity. As a result, his recent sculptures, monoliths of geometric abstraction, inaugurate an aesthetic close to constructed art while remaining personal.
In parallel with his sculptures, Alban Lanore's aesthetic vision is expressed in his works on paper, where, like primitive imprints, he affixes large dark masses made with bitumen, silently allowing their inner light to filter through their interstices.
"AESTHETICS OF CONTRAST” - by Jean Anguera, sculptor and vice-president of the Académie des Beaux-Arts
Talking about sculpture is easy if all you have to do is describe it. In describing it, we discover the person who made it. No doubt he made it with his strength, with what he is physically, but above all with the components of his mind, with the ways in which his thought meets reality - a reality that is as much inner as outer.
Alban Lanore's sculpture is the application of human strength to the carnal softness of wood, the application of the decision and mechanical speed of the tool to the silent dream and internal slowness of the organic material. This is undoubtedly because Alban Lanore combines two natures within himself: the abstract, rational nature of an upright mind that finds expression in the sharpness of steel, in the radicality of metal, and the imaginative nature similar to the melancholy yet secretly resolute suppleness of wood. In his sculpture, these two characteristics are expressed by opposing rather than reconciling them, forming an aesthetic of contrast. The wood's secret design is subjected to the flat planes and angles imposed by the sculptor. It molds itself within the forms, yet beyond the interruptions, the sudden changes, beyond the sharp edges, it continues its original course.
Alban Lanore is tall, solid and certainly courageous. In the face of his work, the tastes that form the basis of his sculpture, the opposition of his characters, he remains free, as he fully assumes his choice of form and material. And his freedom is a sight to behold!
