photography, weird/cool stuff
Flying Houses By Laurent Chehere
Flying Houses By Laurent Chehere
ABOUT LAURENT CHEHERE
Laurent Chéhère is a french artist. He lives in Menilmontant, a popular district of Paris, a real Tower of Babel where you can meet the whole world. These working class neighborhoods of Paris are his playground, his main source of inspiration, his own point of departure and arrival. It’s here in the places, where every street corner offers an escape through the foreigners accents, the spice perfumes, that he has discovered a passion for travel, for people and stories from around the world.
His inspiration is rich and varied, he loves architecture, cinéma, reportage, conceptual ideas, manipulation, retouching, photo-montage. He creates original pictures. These inspirations, he chose to bring them together, especially in The Flying Houses series which carry his universe, his atmosphere, his history, all that the artist wanted to put there, but also everything the public will wants to see there.
His work have been exhibited in numerous place, in particular at ParisPhoto2013, The Fence Festival New York 2016, Seoul Lunar Festival 2015, Photo Phnom Penh Festival 2013, Lumiere Brothers Center for Photography in Moscow 2015, Fotografica Bogota 2015 in Colombia, Caumont Art Center in Aix-en-Provence 2015, John Michael Kohler Art Center 2017 and the MUCEM (Museum of Civilizations of Europe and Mediterranean) in Marseille.
ABOUT FLYING HOUSES
The “Flying Houses” are a surrealistic and poetic vision of old Paris, inspired by Jules Verne, Albert Robida, Moebius, Hayao Miyazaki, William Klein, Wim Wenders, Federico Fellini, Serge Gainsbourg, Martin Scorsese, Marcel Carné, Jean Cocteau and more.
These buildings are also inspired by poor and cosmopolitan neighborhood of the French capital where lives Laurent Chéhère. The author isolates these buildings of their urban context and releases them from the anonymity of the street to tell the life, the dreams and the hopes of these inhabitants.
The images are photomontage of hundred of elements like roof, windows, gutter, fireplace, characters, antennas, graffiti and sky, captured and assembled afterward like a puzzle.
In gallery, the images are shown in large format and let the curious observer to discover details and hiden references of these accurate reconstructions by proposing a double reading, one by far and one closely.
The artist uses this distance to propose a different point of view and alert against preconceived ideas and prejudices. All the ingredients are there, the comedy, the drama, the poetry, the darkness, the onirism, the laughter and the tears… everything becomes entangled.
The author gives some keys, but these flying houses remain open to the interpretation, it’s finally the people who will make his own way.
