Théâtre de Poche Revisited

Invoking the illusory potential of images and investigating the way languages, be they visual, linguistic or symbolic, articulate relations among things, Théâtre de Poche* presents its audience with the increasingly enigmatic figure of a magician who proceeds to conjure a series of images into the air.

Explicating a cyclical tale, this playful meditation by the French-born, Dublin-based artist Aurélien Froment sees stills from cinema history slowly shuffled and hieroglyphs nestle alongside natural wonders, challenging notions of the arrangement and precedence of images and all that they evoke.

When considered in translation, ‘Pocket Theatre’ also prepares its audience for an act of simple but effective entertainment and ultimately references the fabled figure of Arthur Lloyd, the ‘Human Card Index’, who could produce almost any kind of printed item from one of his pockets on request.

Situating itself knowingly as a partial and subjective take on the all-pervasiveness of contemporary visual culture Théâtre de Poche investigates the production of both image- and object-relations and the discursive meanings that such relationships inevitably disclose.

Articulating the tension, and playing with the proximity, between signifier and signified within the system of signs in flux within, Théâtre de Poche confabulates cinematic fragments, relics and discursive tropes with sentience and mystique.

Aurélien Froment (b. 1976) is a multidisciplinary visual artist. Since graduating from the Fine Arts Academy of Nantes, France, he has been working with different media such as film, sculpture and photography on a variety of projects that have taken the shape of installations, scale models and mass produced items.

Works by Froment have been shown at, among others, the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland; Project Arts Centre, Dublin; Tate Britain, London; the Nam June Paik Centre in Seoul; and STUK, Leuven. He is also currently preparing a series of solo presentations at Montehermoso, Vitoria; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Gasworks, London and the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco.

*A re-release of the media release for the exhibition Théâtre de Poche Revisited (14 July - 15 August 2010) by Amit Charan, opening on Tuesday 13 July 2010, 5.30pm.

Permission to reproduce documentation from Théâtre de Poche by Aurélien Froment has kindly been granted by the artist, The Physics Room, and Mark Gore who photographed the work in situ.