Emmanuel Lafont investigates and challenges various facets of the human condition, such as artificial constructs, imagination, and everyday experiences. Shifting between ordinary and surreal, the artist’s distinctive visual language is based on his personal world perception and current emotional state. Lafont thereby metamorphoses reality via the reinterpretation of familiar objects in unconventional contexts to awoke multiple levels of association and reference. Passage of time, a recurring theme in his oeuvre, adds a tension to the pieces through its, often invisible, presence, engaging the viewer on both emotional and intellectual levels.

 

Emmanuel Lafont is a multidisciplinary artist and illustrator, born in Buenos-Aires in 1980. After he studied Fine Arts at the University of Cordoba (Argentina), the artist worked in the South Florida Art Centre (Miami) with Annie Wharton. The atmosphere of Miami, characterized by the blend of pop-culture and design, had a profound impact on his approach. Later Lafont based in Málaga (Spain), where he also had experience as a cultural manager, developing interdisciplinary projects in collaboration with theater directors, actors, musicians, video directors, writers and other artists. His creative formation was shaped by the influences of such figures as BLU, Rene Magritte, Esher, Goya, Lucian Freud among many others. At the moment, Lafont collaborates with various design, architecture and photography studios such as Narita Estudio, La Madre de los Beatles (Malaga), Stone Design (Madrid), Creative Division (Barcelona) and ARTQ (Italy), illustrating editorial and multimedia projects, customizing furniture, and as a concept artist in general. In 2014 he released his first illustrated album " LA OTRA MITAD/THE OTHER HALF " from the publisher CANICA BOOKS.

 

Highly artisanal mediums such as engraving, lithography, sculpture and drawing, in which the artist operates, mirror his method of exploring and articulating ideas: Densely detailed objects demand meticulous analysis of Lafont’s work, prolonging both the creative process and the viewer's interpretation of the motifs. The artist organizes these pictorial elements into a cohesive system, where each component carries an independent meaning while contributing to an overall semantic expression. His interest lay in the coexistence of multiple spatial dimensions through the principles of accretion, interdependence and contradiction. Generated sense of immersion and dynamism allows the observer to wander between paradoxically reconfigured structures as in the labyrinth of his own mind.

 

The resulting intricate compositional and formal arrangements convey narratives, where characters constantly cross the line between fictional and real. Thus the artist deconstructs habitual patterns, filling the gaps of unconscious perception with imagined scenarios: Objects and settings adopted from everyday life undergo a surreal distortion and appear foreign. Through the recognition of ordinary items from unusual perspectives and renewed meanings, Lafont prompts observers to reconsider the hidden complexities within their surroundings and transcend the constraints of the cognition.