Concept
Laurent Gervereau (born 1956, in Paris) is a French artist, novelist, philosopher and filmmaker. The founder of the discipline of Visual History (or Histiconologia), he has devoted his professional life to the world of images, as well as to the direction of cultural and international institutions. Gervereau has been actively engaged in the art world since the 1970s, having participated in exhibitions with several notable surrealists (Philippe Soupault, Belgian or Czech surrealists, Mirabelle Dors, Alfred Courmes, Maurice Rapin, Clovis Trouille, etc.). His artistic and cultural interests include the Dada movement, Proudhon, Charles Fourier, Guy Debord and the situationist movement. He is a member of the Collège de 'Pataphysique. In 1977, he founded the pataphysico-situationist review Aux poubelles de la Gloire with Guy Bodson. There were 13 issues and it finished in 1979. This was the beginning of his philosophy of relativity (Pour une philosophie de la relativité, 2010) against relativism. He then built his theories about cultural ecology, evolutionism, necessity of diversity and movement (plurofuturo), of choice between past and future (retrofuturo) and his struggle against those who have only one way to look at the world, inheritated from the past, and want to uniformise the entire planet (monoretros). He began then his long novel called L'homme planétaire (end of the 1970s). The middle part of this triptych was published by Sens & Tonka in 2001 with the title Ce livre n'est pas à lire (This Book is Not to be Read). It was chosen by the Les Inrockuptibles magazine and the radio channel France Culture as one of the seven best novels of the year. This book is an experiment in mixed media and local-global description in literature: the "crossmedialism". He will make the adaptation for manga of the third part of the tryptique with a Chinese artist Xin Ye ("Mixplanet", 2011). In 1989, he built with Louis Rollinde a new artistic group with a new review in English and French: Painters of History (Les Peintres d'histoire).
Simon François Dumas Primbault
