Vincent Laval

25 km north of Paris, there is a fairytale forest of chestnut, oak and beech trees with a feudal mound, from the top of which you can enjoy a magnificent view of the surrounding landscape. Carnelle Forest is renowned for its biodiversity and also contains the Pierre Turquaise, a covered walkway dating back to the third millennium BC. In this place of exceptional nature and culture, the forest sets the imagination free, so much so that after coming here as a child (he lived just a few metres from the forest’s edge), Vincent Laval never wanted to leave again. The unbreakable bond he forged with the place is still the primary source of his inspiration and artistic practice.

His walks in Carnelle Forest nourish his work. During his long excursions through the undergrowth, he marvels, listens, observes and picks up things that others step on without paying attention. “Gathering", as he likes to call it, is central to his work, an essential cog that connects his walks and the studio, the forest space and his work on sculpture. This interest in materials found in the forest naturally led him to enrol on a woodworking course at the École Boulle and also to the realisation that more than wood, it was the trees he was really interested in, as he showed at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, from which he graduated in 2019.

In the forest, Vincent Laval only takes materials that have fallen to the ground. He is aware that they were once part of a great living whole, and makes sure that he does not forget it and never acts in haste. Some pieces may be left in the forest for several years, then left to dry for almost as long, before he works on them. Sculpting can also take months or even longer, because it takes a long time to put a story together. For example, in OANI (Outils d'Artisanat Non Identifiés, or Unidentified Artisanal Tools), the artist found part of a tree that had fallen to the ground during a walk, then carved it following the same movement. Amazed and won over by the object he obtained, he repeated this exercise 26 times, like letters of the alphabet, transforming formlessness into a tool for language.

His intention is always to change the way we look at things, to shift our perspective. To do so, the artist does not hesitate to climb up into the trees, up to 7 or 8 metres above the ground. From such heights, he looks down onto the sinuous branches and discovers the forest from a different angle, exploring this new perspective with admiration. But it is not for the thrill of the climb, but rather for the feeling of protection that the trees give him, and above all the unique vantage point. This is the feeling he conveys in the spectacular piece on display at the Art Season, Plus loin dans la forêt (Further Into The Forest). Made from hundreds of pieces of wood he had found, the marvellous tangle seems straight out of a fairytale. The strange hut allows the eyes to see through and, more importantly, enables interaction between inside and outside in the way explored by Henry David Thoreau in Walden (1854). To achieve this, hundreds of elements were fitted together so well that they form a continuous whole, as if growing from the soil, a network structure with organic overtones. The work admirably serves the artist's overriding intention of show the forest’s resilience, its splendour and also its fragility.

“There's no point fighting instinct, let alone time. To enter the forest is to come face to face with these two forces. It requires us to let go of what we have become, as humans, in the face of this little fragment inside us that discreetly reminds us of where we come from. I love the forest so much because it escapes me by a hair - I thought I understood it, but in the end it's just a mystery. Living and non-living things are there without needing us, without needing me, just needing balance. To go into the forest is to enter a world that is not our own, but which welcomes us with both its sensory movement and its physical roots, its delicate nature and its strength, its beauty and its hostility. You can stop there for a while and build a hut. A dry place to shelter from the rain, a semblance of a roof to feel protected, a reminder of your mother's womb, a shelter for the first humans, or a young child’s hideaway, the hut connects us to time, life and nature in all its diversity. With Plus loin dans la forêt, I use a highly symbolic object to demonstrate the need to rediscover this close connection with the forest,” writes Vincent Laval.