You and your guest are cordially invited to meet the photographer Dominique Laug? at the preview of his exhibition "Bestiary" on Tuesday, 3 March from 6.pm
Institut Fran?ais d'Ecosse
13 Randolph Crescent
Edinburgh EH3 7TT
Tel: 0131-225.5366
Bestiary ? photographs by Dominique Laug?
As alive as it is abstract, there is something dazzling and new about Laug??s bestiary. If art is a totally subjective vision expressed in a universal language, there are few works that demonstrate this notion as clearly as these. You have to seek it out ? because with all the boldness of the angles, the eccentric solutions and the unnatural colours, his images appear so real, so complete and in a sense classical, that they really appear to have existed for ever. This is not the case: to comprehend this, try to imagine them before they were invented. Eugenio Bitetti
For Dominique Laug? the word zoo evokes a personal, domestic, familiar experience ? a little park on Lake Leman which was a kind of rescue centre that rehabilitated abandoned and sick animals. He used to go there with his children when they were little, and what he glimpsed there moved him. Seeing things through his children?s eyes furthered the process of discovery, while as an adult he was also pervaded with an ironic sensation of disenchantment. The resulting images are particularly interesting because they offer up a vision of the magic that the sensitivity of a trained eye perceives in the banality of an everyday scene. [?] He sees animals according to the ancient Latin definition, as animated beings, with an anima that animates them. This is what his photography succeeds in capturing. Philippe Daverio
Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201
