À peu près Euclide

Published by Fotokino

« À peu près Euclide » is a graphic and chromatic exploration of the language of Oliver Byrne, author of a book celebrating the marriage of art and science in 1850. From the making of models to photographic prints with gum bichromate, which gives them a graphic quality that is difficult to identify, Laurent Millet, like the English author in this audacious work of scientific vulgarisation, evokes the vocabularies of the twentieth century avant-gardes or the Memphis movement, that of the scientific laboratory and of observation tools, but also, joyfully, that of childhood. The book is presented as an unbound portfolio which pages, slipped into a pocket, adapt to the format of the 21 photographs. Since the mid-1990s, Laurent Millet has been composing chapters of an imaginary encyclopaedia, inhabited by objects that he constructs and photographs in natural settings or in his studio. As a methodical researcher, he organises his work in series, all of which present themselves as a mystery to the viewer, and which offer the opportunity to question the status of the image.