FRENCH TOAST

For this exhibition at VIN VIN Naples, Thomas Liu Le Lann (1994) draws us into its bittersweet sphere. The title French Toast plays on the same register as most of the works presented. The videos, the objects, the images, the installations have the reassuring, vanilla taste of sweet and cloying foods. For Thomas Liu Le Lann, art remains a means of transforming the world, but it is also an acid revelation of the failure of our dreams. His universe is ours, but it is also, and above all, a personal story of love and disillusionment. Often through the effect of collage, Thomas Liu Le Lann superimposes feelings. Like the historical artists of Pop Art, he assembles standardized and familiar elements to fix complex personal impressions full of a slight disappointment. Thus, in his latest film, from apparent holiday memories we slide into the metaphor of what could be the artist's destiny today. Are we to understand this character of a swordsman who swims as one of the Powerful Potentials? Does the artist still believe in it, imagining that even underwater and without an adversary, the armed character remains potentially strong? Or is this image just the ultimate reflection of an outdated aesthetic that survives even drowned? Thomas Liu Le Lann is not here to answer and fortunately. He stares at images that are elegantly complex, leaving nostalgia and memory in our hands. A bit like a Sunday in the late afternoon, Thomas Liu Le Lann sets the scene for our little weariness. Thus, in this installation of chairs of an extremely standard model, made of coloured plastic, but also handcrafted, the possible has fallen. We could choose one over the other, but that's the end of it. If nothing is impossible, as in love, a little touch of sadness invades us as time passes and choices become rarer. A series of coloured glass pieces are placed on transport trolleys. Soft forms seem to be waiting. Nothing is missing that everything can be moved, at the risk of breaking. But the assembly is as elegant as it is suspended. The sculptures remain strange objects that are out of order. Whereas on large black and white prints, worn-out industrial meal trays are deconstructed. This series, Leftovers, allows us to see the extent to which Thomas Liu Le Lann detects in everyday life the flaws of what remains of our over fictionalized intimacy. Once again, like his Pop Art alter egos, he cannot leave us insensitive to what the calibration of objects has done to our lives. He knows, as they do, that once the observation is over, it will be a question of finding a poetic space that will still allow us to talk together. The exhibition ends with an installation that presents two black vinyl Softheroes. Thomas Liu Le Lann returns here with his characters who are hard not to think of as alter-egos. An effect of dull and dark weariness seems to prevail as fate. Thus, being an artist can perhaps consist in knowing that it is possible to build superheroes for oneself, but to know so much about the model that it becomes difficult to dream of them anymore. With this latest installation, Thomas Liu Le Lann sets the tone. Each of us needs to be able to count on artists who are not afraid or ashamed to remember that as children, we really ate too much sugar. Samuel Gross, 2023