KVT – Lolo’s Metal Dreams

Alliterative Lolo Zazar in poetic space @ L’Espace

Before I get to the main point of this article which is to do with a family of images represented below, you’ll have to put up with a bit of recent history about the artist who made them.

As I’ve said before, if you’ve got a name that sounds as exotic as Lolo Zazar’s you should have a personality or a talent to make the most of it and the French expat we know as Lolo has oodles of both with some left over.

Lolo has often featured in the Hanoi cultural scene.

At a PechaKucha event at the Cinemateque in 2012 he just about had us rolling on the floor with screenings of two films he made as a younger man and about which I wrote:
By far my favorite part of the night was Lolo Zazar’s screening of 2 of his short films from the 1990′s, during interval. They were Monty Python gone Gallic and certainly need more exposure and more screenings to zany people who like to roar with laughter.
The last one was a wild-cap, belly-laugh hoot.

These showcased Lolo’s expertise as an animator which he’s put to excellent use mentoring Vietnamese film makers

Lolo put his name up in very bright lights in 2013 with an exceptional exhibition of funky, functional lamps at Module 7 which received an excellent review and an exuberant opinion piece with even more illuminations with just three of the many inventive lamps shown here:

The last lamp with a phone number featured is a reference to an earlier exhibition at L’Espace in 2012 and is the contact number for a KH CAT B TONG worker, those pesky but necessary groups of laborers that drill and cut concrete and demolish buildings with lots of ear splitting noise. Their graffiti templates lots of public walls of Hanoi and throughout other Vietnamese cities

Lolo made photos of lots of those ubiquitous KCBT numbers on walls and as I stated in an opinion piece.

‘managed to get the kh cat be tong and the patinas on the walls they inhabit down beautifully in his large photographic prints mounted on wood blocks…the paint strokes used by local authorities to erase the illegal graffiti; mould and moss that invades one; aged and weathered cracked and layered paint and concrete; swathes of colors that are relative newcomers to the creams and greens of old Hanoi……I’ve used ‘patina’ to mean ‘a surface of something grown beautiful especially with age or use’ and in Lolo’s prints he has created beautiful images of parts of surfaces that certain types of people – including me – often find incredibly beautiful as wholes or as isolated portions.’

It was an exhibition that was very successful with Vietnamese viewers.

Lolo has the ability to mount his exhibitions so that they pull you right into them and this is the case with his latest now on the walls at L’Espace.

This time Lolo has shot micro images of stains, rust, and chemical deterioration on metal and had them made into macro images printed on thin sheets of stainless steel mounted on wood, and as I’ve said before, he manages to catch and manipulate images that a lot of us with a certain peculiar eye focus are intrigued with as we stroll by and try to capture on film… but never seem to be able to do so with his poetic nouse.

And POETIC could be the word that describes Lolo’s metal dreams… and as a practical dreamer, he has looked at the finished results and titled them as a poet might do… such as this one: In the Depths of Space

which if you rotate it could be given the same name or another that your imagination may take flight and choose …with one scallywag labeling the last as Prophylactic in Lager

So here’s a quiz ….below are the names of some of Lolo’s images -most roughly translated from French which is his native language

A CHANCE ENCOUNTER WITH A BEAR

A WOLF AND THE MOON

THE GENIE AND THE SERPRENT

LOST IN SPACE

A MAN AND A BIRD

MAGIC WATERFALL

DIVINITE DE LA NATURE

LA FETE

Now see if you can caption them to the appropriate image

And Lolo’s titles are: LA FETE…A WOLF AND THE MOON….LOST IN SPACE….A CHANCE ENCOUNTER WITH A BEAR…A MAN AND A BIRD…THE MAGIC WATERFALL…DIVINITE DE LA NATURE..THE GENIE AND THE SERPENT

It’s another of Lolo’s exhibitions mounted with flair and you can accept Lolo’s poesy or just look into their depths and rename the individual works as word images flare to mind …or just do as I would do ….swivel them around occasionally so that you see them anew.

Also, catch the lift if you are lazily inclined, or take the stairs to other levels to see examples of a couple of Lolo’s previous exhibitions, including those effective
KCBTees.

I’ll add a rider here and state that this exhibition didn’t grab me as much as those excellent lamps or the KCBTees but what I like about Lolo is that he doesn’t mind changing course and that’s what makes me anticipate his exhibitions with a smile on my face

Lolo can’t be categorized as a stick in the mud.