Bernard lagneau

The Artist

Bernard Lagneau was born March 27, 1937 in Courbevoie (92).
He lived and worked in Paris until 1992.
Since he lives in the department of Drôme on the South Est of France.
Student at the Estienne School in 1950-1955, until 1969 he work than model maker of books and journals.
From 1970 he began work mechanization of various "places" (a hundred to date) in France and abroad (Germany, Switzerland, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic). He also built several fugitive architectures.

Bernard Lagneau has always refused to sell his creations, elements of its installations.
He considers these creations as part of material allowing it to achieve its large mechanized architectures. He has always lived by renting its fixtures and installations. This practice is in a public setting, recognizes and emphasizes the specificity of each place and is defined as ephemeral.
The corrugated and card board is its basic material, chosen for its technological possibilities (lightness, adapted strength, no danger but also for his friendly nature of the environment)
It is as neutral or even despised, avoiding the usual aesthetic attitudes.
Finally the cardboard has some aspect that Bernard Lagneau do not feel no need to distort. He refuses to hide the material by color.
For forty years he explores and exploits the properties of cardboard, "genius engineer" plays with the paradoxes of this material transcended by his imagination.
These recycled materials are used to give true nobility to his works and give concrete substance to his ideas.
Marc Blot adds: "Cardboard city, paper board city, card boards castles are spaces of ambiguities and dreams. So we glad to see coexistence of opposites. We agree with the absurd. We take advantage of derision. We love the destructible. We do not work for eternity. "
In all its ephemeral installations, artistic machine works, not necessarily in a vacuum: they produce meaning, poetry, wonder, imagination, creativity but also the emotional, cognition and friendliness with visitors. Some commercial malls have understood by asking him to live their atriums.
During his artist's life, the works of Bernard Lagneau can be classified into six main themes:
- The cubic Studies
- Fugitive Architectures
- Mechanized Explorations landscapes, or mechanized places
- Characters: Fathers La Chaises, or the Castaways,
- The cabins temples
- The drawings
Through all his accomplishments, we can consider that it is the inventor of this ephemeral art, the precursor of the illusion art, that we see developing today by many other artists?