Thomas Lanfranchi

Thomas Lanfranchi is among the rare artists whose slightest output is met with consistently renewed interest. Working with the same tenacity as a scholar – or better still, like the dilettante and obsessive inventors found throughout the history of technologies –, he has carried out consistent research for years, away from large showy networks and somewhere on the borders – and at the tipping point, the improbable junction where they may meet – of sculpture, performance, and drawing.
Let’s start with the former: Thomas Lanfranchi creates large geometrical volumes. But you won’t see any marble here, or anything like it. He goes against the flow of durability, sturdiness, and bulkiness – qualities that still often haunt the field of sculpture. Instead, he crafts these shapes out of plastic bags, in whatever colour the industry has to offer. The sculptor’s role is reduced to cutting and taping together the rudimentary and fragile membrane. […] Although they are preserved through film and photography, it is quite obvious that their essence can only truly be appreciated in real time. In addition to flirting with performance arts, Thomas Lanfranchi’s sculpture, because it is reduced to this membrane, also induces an essential link with drawing: although it is made out of plastic and set in three-dimensional space, the final piece is still the result of a linear construction. And this is where the primary aspect of his work – sculpture, to put it simply and to use an all too easy term – merges with another: a more classic practice of drawing. […]

Thomas Lanfranchi by François Coadou (excerpt), 2015
Documents d'artistes Nouvelle-Aquitaine commission