Patrick Laumond was born to a father from Cantal, a hydromechanics engineer, and a mother born in Brive la Gaillarde, trained as an aesthetician. He grew up in several regions of France. At 10 years old, he returned to Corrèze where he spent his adolescence. Constrained by his father who enrolled him at the Pierre Caraminot National Professional School in Egletons, he was a boarder there until obtaining his baccalaureate in mechanical engineering. At the time of choices, he joined the Henri Brisson National Higher Professional School in 1994, where he learned applied science in technical and industrial ceramics, in Vierzon. He was noticed by Jacky Trotereau, professor and head of the ceramics art and decoration laboratory, who allowed him direct entry into the 2nd year at the National Higher School of Arts and Applied Arts in Paris at Olivier de Serres (ENSAAMA). He graduated top of his class with jury congratulations for the presentation of his personal portfolio in 1996. At the same time, he did an internship with Delphine Charlotte Parmentier where he conceptualized accessories for Ungaro and Christian Lacroix and objects for the ceramics museum in Dunkerque. He decided to return to his native land in Corrèze and set up a ceramics workshop in the family home which he abandoned a few years later to become an artist. Back in Paris, he devoted himself essentially to painting. He met Madame Denyse Durand Ruel several times who supported him to participate in the prestigious residency of the French Institute in Japan (Villa Kujoyama) which was refused to him despite her recommendation. Among his influences can be cited, Antoni Tapiès, Yves Klein, Miquel Barceló, Joseph Heinrich Beuys.
Experimentation:
At 17, Laumond creates scenes of daily life on a reduced scale... And already a precision of gesture, the desire to leave nothing to chance, to reproduce everything to scale; sharp, demanding, rigorous. Very quickly, it is the exploration of matter in all its forms. All materials: solid, liquid. The watchmaker becomes an alchemist. Hours spent transforming cardboard into leather, making mixtures, milk, walnut stain, studying chemical phenomena of attraction, repulsion, density... He experiments with stoneware, earthenware, porcelain, raku, glazes... kneads, mixes, deforms, fires, hammers, glues. The work of matter becomes an obsession. For 15 years, he will work on the realization of a stain. Exploring painting, its pigments, its components, the phenomena of solidification, heterogeneity, until controlling, mastering, modeling under his hand the expansion, the drips of this stain... until the perfect and unique realization, which will become his signature, his technique: the stained work.
Language:
Laumond does not lock himself into his stain, he then creates the white work, first as an element to highlight the stained work which thus explodes more intensely before our eyes. Then little by little the white work becomes a counterweight, complementary, essential, and finally inseparable from the stained work. Then begins a period of great intensity for the artist, also a period of lightness, where he will have fun, play with these two elements. The white work and the stained work correspond, speak to each other, become a language, a movement, the expression of the artist. From this prolific period, Laumond creates thousands of works.
Meta:
His works cannot remain static, prisoners of the artist himself... They must occupy space, deploy, breathe, live, transform because everything transforms. Volumes, matrices, elements in space appear, until space becomes part of the work itself and us with it. The will is to go beyond his own thought, his own language, to, like a philosopher, synthesize through his art universal thought, the absolute, the universe... The work becomes meta. For him, it is manifestly impossible to present what surrounds him through a single work, a monobloc work. He produces a more theoretical modeling that consists of a work distributed in several distinct elements relative to each other, demonstrating the ALL and its opposite. This modeling results in what could be called a representation of the Great ALL.
Theorization and MetaHism:
For 11 years, notebooks of thousands of transcriptions preceded the conceptualization of works and the development of the MetaHism manifesto. A new language was born and a first attempt at theorization. In 2009, he founded MetaHism, an artistic movement aimed at expressing and materializing human thought in the form of a meta-paradigm. According to the artist, MetaHism connects a global vision of visible and invisible events simultaneously. The prefix 'META' evokes the Whole, 'ISM' its own artistic movement and 'H', eighth letter of the alphabet, separating and unifying letter, an infinite movement symbolized by the lemniscate ∞.
A paradigm of universality:
Laumond's work is a paradigm that speaks to us about the cycles of life, a meditation on the paradoxes of existence and our infinite possibilities. Essential creative process, countless detailed and precise sketch notebooks, choice of materials from the Compagnons de France, nothing is left to chance, everything is a search for mastery. Laumond has built a completely singular language in service of a global work that can be qualified as a paradigm. Global because cyclical, open and closed, unified and multiple. A Work where the symbol is omnipresent.
Global vision and complex thinking:
His universe can evoke a mise en abyme of "complex thinking" developed by Edgard Morin. This "theory of Everything" allows him to present in each installation a cross-vision of several cultures; religions, sciences, politics and the human condition from all angles. Complex vision, humanistic and humorous vision, global and fragmented vision, paradoxical vision, his universe where white dominates is an invitation to interiority. As Edgard Morin writes, "The real problem is that we have learned too well to separate. It is better to learn to connect. To connect, that is to say not only to establish end to end a connection, but to establish a connection that is made in a loop." Laumond's research is that of a reconstruction of link, loop, circle in which the movement of life can be written in its infinite diversity and its infinite possibilities. Search for a universal model: His quest is that of writing a universal model. "I realized that it is manifestly impossible to present what surrounds us through a single work, a monobloc work. This led me to produce a more theoretical modeling that must consist of a work distributed in several elements, distinct from each other demonstrating the ALL and its opposite. This modeling results in what could be called a representation of the Great ALL" Laumond The conception of what he calls "the Work", thus evoking the globality of his language and the result of his long research work, comes from an allegory of the Big Bang. This mysterious moment when the world self-produced. By creating his own language, Laumond creates a multidimensional space and puts into perspective the paradox; the idea of the signifier and the insignificant, balances in imbalance, full and empty, the passage from one state to another and all this in a representation of a coherent model. This representation also takes into account artistic movements, by merging them, cubism, minimalism, readymade, pointillism, figurative, abstraction, are found in his formal evocation.
Creating a language, a challenge:
How to tell the world in a single work? That is his challenge. What language to create to respond to this desire for coherence and representation of the Whole? "The stained work is an original representation of the ALL, passing through the living, ideas, what is visible. The white work is a potential representation of all possible like infinity, eternity, the limit in the unlimited, it is always in opposition, connected to the stained work. They always position themselves in dialogue with each other encompassing a central work which is a different representation in form but identical in the idea of thought...". Laumond Where the writer will use words to write his story, where ideograms have allowed with simple strokes the creation of a language without limits, Laumond has created a "universal language". In the Laumond universe, subjects, thoughts, concepts are symbolized by simple elements represented by a "volumetric structure", variable and yet constant form. His words are white or glass volumes and volumes worked in monochrome (stained). The volumes: Whether they are full or empty, white or transparent, immaculate or identified by their "stain", whether they are alone or connected to others, whatever their size, their shape, each of these volumes carries its meaning. They become parables. The link: Connected by an infinity of gray lines, which mark, unify, cut or connect space and works to each other, the volumes tell the global story. The stain: At the origin of his creative process, it is a monochrome worked to the extreme, "mistreated" to become alive. It could have sufficed, it is the Big Bang, the point of hatching, the vision of the real, of an identity visible to all.
A work born from the right brain:
The right brain manages images, it is synthetic and global. It functions not with codes but with analogies. It is the place of intuition, creativity, global vision. Laumond observes the world, from all angles and apprehends its globality, its explosion, balances in imbalance, paradoxes, possibilities. The vision he has of it is empathetic and encompasses a philosophical, scientific, humanistic and sensitive gaze. He has managed to develop a universe of absolute coherence. At the service of an endless reading and yet specific to each. The spectator becomes a true actor in the interpretation of these parables. He expresses a sharp, deep and acute gaze on the world, on its formats and on the "human comedy". No repentance, no correction, no addition is permitted to him by the demanding choice of white, immaculate, perfect, luminous, intransigent.
A holographic work:
Each volume is at the service of the whole and we can say that the whole of an installation is a work in itself. When we speak of a hologram, we mean that "the whole is more than the sum of the parts, the part is in the whole, but the whole is in the part". The most common example is that of an individual's genetic heritage found in each cell that composes it. It is the consciousness of what brings together the infinitely small to the infinitely large. He offers us visual and sensory interrogations about everything that surrounds us, the art world, its references and the end of painting, the artists and movements that preceded him, Duchamp, Fontana, but as a subtle and fertile analyst, he brings his aesthetic and formal response, his vision, his kaleidoscopic play and an aesthetics of perfection. In 2009, he conceptualized the MetaHism manifesto in the form of a work of art. Ten years later, he writes an undeclared declaration. In 2021, he is invited by the European Cultural Center of Italy (ECC Italy) to exhibit on the occasion of the Venice Biennale at the Bembo Palace. He exhibits "Universal Concordance". On the same occasion, he meets Marion Zilio, art theorist, art critic and member of AICA France. She writes an analysis that accompanies his work during his exhibition. He is invited to exhibit in his childhood town of Saint-Viance, an immersive work with augmented reality "The mobile of opening of parallel universes" in a consecrated building of France.