�Wow! What a debunking eye cast by a man of today at the sham glamour of our time!�

Pierre Restany Milan. July 9th, 1998

Laurence Gartel is surfing on the wave of electronic communication through the poetic impulse of his multimedia-language.

Photography, graffiti, digital paint blend on his computer as in the weaving loom of an everlasting tapestry: a texture of fragmented visual elements in continuous progress whose varied serial lines form the consecutive photograms of a mental film in full virtual surfacing. Those series may as well feature images created for advertising projects like Coca-Cola or Absolut Vodka, images which appear on the back covers of national magazines or on posters announcing cultural events (concert, film festival ... ). The varying versions of the original model fit in the thick weave of the artist's sensitivity towards the emotional magma of everyday life. Those electronic collages that Gartel creates using the capabilities of the most recent sophisticated software, express the impredictable impulses of his expressive conscience.

Such a visual language does not address any more the rational reality from which it originates, but reaches indeed the infinite lavishness of desires already collected among the masses by the industry of culture.

As a true "fabulist" of our present time, Gartel uses Internet for its fabulous capacities of amalgaming the illimited variety of differences included in each existential microcosms of the human being. The formal profile of the communication vector resulting from such process follows the seductive throbs of daily life, being captivated meanwhile. Here we are, right in the basic grounds of Gartel's expressiveness: the author assumes his self-awareness throught the full description of his journey on Earth, piece by piece, instant after instant. Gartel's fictional story carries its specific weight through its continuity, its inner dynamics grafted on every emotional fragment of the objective reality of the world.

Unfortunately the story of the "electronic photographer", as Gartel describes himself, appears to us always as a fragment or a suspended moment. Pointing out in a single book the full stream of the artist's vision in its unbroken line seems to be a gigantic task: goodness knows how long we will have to wait for it!

A thing remains sure: Gartel is designing, image by image, the encyclopaedia of his entire life. with smooth gracefulness and self-assurance, this man of his time acts beyond other people's time. The river stream of Gartel's visual fiction has no spring and no mouth: it gives free play to his imagination through the dizzy spells of our modern chaos. And this shivering sensation of free-thinking upsets all the formal taboos nourished by the retinal persistence of our visual prejudices. Wow! What a debunking eye cast by a man of to-day at the sham glamour of our time!