LEGORAMART: Who is Laurent Bramardi?

Many of you have already supported the project LEGORAMART initiated by Muttpop on ulule.com and I encourage anyone who has not yet made up their mind to do so quickly at this address, the financing of the project to be completed before the deadline of October 17, 2013.

This beautiful 144-page book, delivered for 40 € with a collector's box and a giant cover poster, brings together a selection of the most beautiful creations of seven LEGO artists (Cole Blaq, Jason Freeny, Nathan Sawaya, Mike Stimpson, Kristina Alexanderson , Dean West and Angus McLane) interviewed by Laurent Bramardi, founder of the publishing house dedicated to photography: Work is Progress.

But if the artists mentioned above are known to many of you, Laurent Bramardi is not a character who gravitates in "our universe": Work is Progress publishes books of photographs and documents combining politics, reportage, and artistic approach.

To offer us some ideas on his character, he kindly agreed to lend himself to the exercise of the interview, in the same format as those you will be able to discover in the book.

I therefore propose below a brief meeting in seven questions / answers with one of the men at the origin of LEGORAMART :

Your first LEGO memory?

Laurent Bramardi: I didn't play too much with LEGO when I was a kid, but I remember an '80s commercial for a LEGO space station. I found it on YoutTube, it has aged rather badly: in fact, CGIs are not bad, after all.

The toy of your childhood?

LB: Star Wars figures. I spent hours imagining that the shrubs in the garden were giant trees, I would have liked to get lost in them.

Damien Hirst (British contemporary artist editor's note) or Georges Lucas?

LB: Georges Lucas until I was 18, after Hirst was not yet known but I would have chosen him without too much hesitation. In any case they are real businessmen, each in their category, and this is not necessarily the kind of dreamer that I like the most today.

The photo you will never forget?

LB: A photo of Antoine d'Agata, a very dark view of a rough sea, in Japan I believe - one of his images that escapes his usual themes, at first at least. The grain is very marked, clouds of carbonaceous, dense points, which transform the landscape into an almost abstract view. We recognize the waves, the foam, the wind, the leaden sky, but all this tells about something else, an atmosphere. It's an image that comes to mind very often.

Your movie and bedside book?

LB: It's a really difficult question, there are so many things… A film by Malick or the Quay Brothers, if you really had to choose, something quite contemplative anyway. There are few other mediums to stretch time as well as cinema. For the books I will take two, La Nausée by Sartre and Tristes Tropiques by Levi-Strauss. They are old comrades who have followed me for a long time and whom I always reread: they tell me as much about their respective subjects as about the evolution of my way of seeing things ...

The thing you wouldn't dare say with a LEGO?

LB: That the class struggle is over.

Is there a LEGO art?

LB: We will see in a few years whether it is chosen, in any case there is indeed in my opinion a new form of dissemination of creation, which will perhaps be the new vector of art to come. In fact, I don't know if we can speak of "art", try to define it, other than in the past, if we can think of it other than as an established fact.