‘Matthieu Laurette – Commodities’ is Matthieu Laurette’s first one-man show at a European gallery outside France. The artist was born in 1970 in Villeneuve St. Georges and lives and works in Paris and New York. Laurette’s working area and field of interest is the commercial public space : the supermarket, the press, …every zone in which interest or need is being commercialised. His technique is often a combination of different mediums. His « apparitions », installations and objects are all products of processes that are started up or controlled by his activity as a mediatised person and as a consumer. A work by Laurette always generates a multitude of  issues and comments regarding our consumptive society, the identity of the consumer ànd the artist, and the interaction between economy, commerce and art. His questioning of the place of the artist in society and specifically in society as it is presented to us in the media also seems to be an essential characteristic. In 2003 he received the Prix RICARD S.A. for most representative French artist of less than 40 years old.

Matthieu Laurette gained international attention with his contribution to ‘Platea dell’Umanita’, the exhibition put together by Harald Szeemann at the 2001 Venice Biennale. A variation of the large-scale installation entitled ‘Mobile Information Stand for Moneyback Products’, which was shown there at the Corderie of the Arsenale, is one of the ten works selected by Matthieu Laurette for his first show in Otegem. A few lines from the catalogue of the same Venice Biennale:

‘By reversing the laws of marketing and mass media and turning them to his advantage, Matthieu Laurette’s work applies a strategy of infiltration and redistribution. In 1993, he made his debut artistic appearance in the guise of a contestant in the TV game show Tournez manège. In his interview with the show’s hostess, Evelyne Leclerc, he identified himself as a ‘multimedia artist’. From that point onwards, he has been using television both as a workplace and as an instrument, because this medium has the capacity to bring together the means of production, the distribution channel and a public, all at the same time. At first, he simply played the part of a passive member of the audience in a great number of TV shows, just like any ordinary person, thus building up a collection of Apparitions (appearances). These are ready-made images that go back to both the rendez-vous ideas of Marcel Duchamp and to the “fifteen minutes of fame” of Andy Warhol.’ (Freely adapted from Pascal Beausse, ‘Matthieu Laurette’, La 49. Biennale di Venezia, Platea dell’Umanita, Electa, 2001, p. 264-265).

Evelyne Leclerc:         What exactly would you like to be later?

Matthieu Laurette:      An artist.

E.L.:                           An artist! Right. But what exactly? A painter? A sculptor?

M.L.:                           A multimedia artist.

E.L.:                           Multimedia, well answered!

(Extract from the show Tournez Manège, TF1, 16 March 1993.)

In recent years, Matthieu Laurette has shown his work in many international galleries and museums, including the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York, the ICA in London, the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain in Geneva, the Centre Pompidou, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg.

For his first exhibition in Belgium, Matthieu Laurette has chosen to select a range of different ‘things’. He wanted to present an ensemble of works that are all rooted in the reality of the contemporary economy and that aim at questioning the value of commodities. Works that add to eachothers meaning, that are directly connected with our everyday reality and that question the media and the process of ‘médiatisation’ as well as the concepts and principles of information, travelling, the global economy, commerce and the status and function of the artist. Works that have been conceived and created through many different processes, often involving ‘third parties’ like the media, graphic designers and waxworks. The resulting show includes, for instance, a videowall, a sculpture representing the artist, a newly-designed carpet, a giant map of the world, photographs, press cuttings, magazines and posters.