Carron’s humorous works appropriate existing objects and cultural symbols, often replicated in a different material, including iron shop signs, crucifixes, and musical instruments.
Using existing objects and environments
Carron’s main inspirations include public artworks, works in Swiss museums and foundations, and natural landscapes, notably from his home, the Swiss canton of Valais.
At the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, where Carron represented Switzerland, the artist showed readymades mixed with ideals of traditional Swiss landscapes, or images the Swiss authorities fabricated to increase tourism and strengthen national identity.
As such, Carron brought nationalism and capitalistic structures into conversation with notions of authorship and originality, raising questions around the ideas and objects that are passed down and conserved, and who they ultimately benefit.
Re-thinking tradition
Attesting to the cultural shifts of his times, Carron’s practice of recovering existing cultural ideas and objects and looking at their significance in the present, introduces elements of pop culture and kitsch to question the relevance of tradition in times of mass-production.
Sculptural works like the polystyrene and resin cast figure L’oiseau fou (after Pellegrini) or the bronze and wood Bell, 2013 (For Parkett 93) (both 2013), shift the authority and charge of the stone sculpture and the Swiss nationalist symbol by rendering them in lightweight materials, integrating both into the fabric of everyday life.
Plagiarism controversy
Carron was accused of plagiarism for replicating a steel artwork by Francesco Marino di Teana, L’Aube from 1977, in polystyrene, fibreglass, and acrylic resin, in a work titled The Dawn (2014), which showed with Eva Presenhuber at FIAC in 2014.
Di Teana’s son noted the very exact nature of the copy, while Carron affirms that he only sought to ‘replicate the emotion this work provoked.’ The artist has said that his appropriations are not a question of copying but interpreting the vernacular of artistic forms.
Others stood behind Carron’s work, noting the difference in material, the intentionality of the title, as well as the legitimacy of the act itself, which had been employed by the artist’s former professor John Armleder.
