Lilian Daubisse at Arums

In his first solo exhibition, Lilian Daubisse revealed the depth of his imagination as well as his talent as a craftsman. Born in 1970, he graduated with a degree in design in 1996 from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Nantes. During the ensuing years, he has refined and elaborated an esthetic project using a single medium: corrugated cardboard. In Daubisse's capable hands, this drab, utterly ordinary material produces astonishing visual effects.

The eight works on view (all 2007) confound traditional divides between design, fashion and sculpture. Hedgehog (an edition of 6) is a hooded waistcoat with billowing sleeves entirely covered in extra-long fringe resembling the quills of the mammal for which it was named. To fabricate it, the artist manually cut thousands of strands of cardboard, each only a few millimeters wide, painted them black and wove them onto a polyester shell. This labor-intensive process produced a tactile garment that suggests an Inuit parka, or an ultra-trendy gorilla suit. Opposite it stood Fish, a full-length, double-layered capelike getup, also with a hood. Its small, crescent-shaped pieces of overlapping corrugated cardboard are affixed vertically to a matrix of piano wire and monofilament, echoing the scales of an aquatic creature. This imposing one-of-a-kind confection also evokes the sort of extraterrestrial armor that might suit Darth Vader, or Grace Jones.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Daubisse's smaller works have equally rich associations. Pottery 1, 2 and 3 are fashioned from several nippled demispheres, calling to mind ceremonial vessels as well as mini satellites or spaceships. Disk and Medusa are pendant wall sculptures. In the former, long pieces of cardboard are curved tightly into concentric circles, with their irregular edges exposed. The latter features locks of jet-black human hair laid flat on a circular support, to the center of which the artist attached a round mirror. The allusion is to the shield of Athena, which bore Medusa's monstrous decollated head with its serpent tresses.

In all his work, Daubisse exploits the physical structure of corrugated cardboard to establish captivating visual rhythms. In so doing, he invests otherwise banal gestures--cutting, weaving, stringing--with the exuberance and aura of ritual.

COPYRIGHT 2008 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning