Aurélien Froment

Théâtre de Poche

The Théâtre de Poche video is inspired by Arthur Lloyd / “Human Card Index”, a magician who was famous for being able to take out of his pockets any image requested by his spectators. His coat hid over 15 000 different prints. In Aurélien Froment’s work, a magician presents images by making them appear, disappear or move in space. The performance is accompanied by a rather rudimentary sounding music that highlights the artifice of the magician’s tricks and places the whole in a comedic register. He also manipulates the images himself and creates associations which seem to spell out a meaning. It can also appear as a metaphor for artistic creation, ideas that coincide, hesitations and experiments that constitute a practice. Inevitably one also ends up making connections between art and magic, the artist and the magician, artistic technique with that of illusion. In this work, Aurélien Froment questions modes of representation pursued in the publication Théâtre de Poche (Volume 1) in which he interviews different people (an architect, someone working in advertising and a creator of puzzles) who manipulate images daily in their jobs.