Guillaume Leblon
18 Mar - 08 May 2014
© Guillaume Leblon
La grande seiche II (detail), 2014
Plaster, polyethylene, pigment, animal ink, wood
204 x 102 x 4 cm
La grande seiche II (detail), 2014
Plaster, polyethylene, pigment, animal ink, wood
204 x 102 x 4 cm
GUILLAUME LEBLON
The Constant Repetition Of False
18 March - 8 May 2014
Guillaume Leblon’s work is filled with references evoking nature, architecture, the domestic habitat or the artist studio. His sculptures, his objects, his installations, have always a particular trait of strangeness which concentrates the attention and arouses discussion.
Material, form and craft are always at the core in Leblon’s work, yet the artist’s refined formal language is a subtext to its critical reclaiming of the mechanics of interpretation. Leblon is able to generate a vocabulary of forms and syntax that range from the concrete to the visionary, the critical to the enigmatic, integrating symbolic, and poetical associations.
“My work is made during my movements and travels and not really in the studio, which I regard like a receptacle where the sum of all the things I collect is to be found” 1, Leblon, says. And this “movements” seem to be translated into the exhibition space, as “I want to offer the audience a certain point of view to look at the work so as to create a sense of strolling in the exhibition space, i.e. the exhibition becomes a landscape, a routing, without starting or ending point”.*
The Constant Repetition of False, Leblon’s fourth exhibition at ProjecteSD collects and integrates all these different notions found in the French artist practice in a group of new works: his ability to transform and transfigure scraps, remnants, organic elements appropriated from nature, all sort of found pieces into a visual experience; his skillful manipulation of space which allows to choreograph his works into a larger spatial narrative within the exhibition venue; the idea of fragmentation and disjunction, the sense of ephemeral, the relationship with materials, textures, surfaces, which manifests itself in works that hint at a kind of alchemy.
A series of groups of works are presented for the first time in the exhibition. Le Très Grand Rideau is a hanging sculptural installation which breaks the exhibition space. It is literally a useless curtain soaked in plaster that sort of indicates a path, a crooked route along the room which seems to hide/show an interior passage. No me llames Juan, also made with cloth and plaster, displayed on one side of the gallery, in a small semi-circular structure seems to evoke a private concealed space. Two sets of double “bas-reliefs”, La Grande Seiche and Recette, both of sculptural and pictorial quality, show the traces, the imprinted marks of some organic remains. A cuttlefish, some pieces of fruit can be recognised on the plaster bed. Like an image of a fossilized life which is no longer there. This uncanny landscape of “nature mortes” is accentuated by another set of sculptures, Le Secret I and Le Secret II, two concave metal bars anchored in the ceiling, from which a series of other perishable objects, bodily fragments and solidified pieces of clothes are collected and suspended. A reference, like in Le Très Grand Rideau to a domestic interior, the home, or maybe the studio. A landscape of objects both frozen and transient at once.
As it was pointed out by Thomas Boutoux: “Guillaume Leblon’s exhibitions become the sites of unprecedented articulations of objects, often heterogeneous but always compatible, sites with well-balanced dynamics, temporary and successive, somewhere between what is almost known and the barely known. They sketch unusual landscapes of objects and shapes where the temporalities clash, the past like the future plunging explicitly into our present”.
*Note: Some of the ideas and quotes in this press release have been extracted from the text Roadblocks by Michelle Grabner published in the book Helbling by Guillaume Leblon (Paraguay Press, 2013).
The Constant Repetition Of False
18 March - 8 May 2014
Guillaume Leblon’s work is filled with references evoking nature, architecture, the domestic habitat or the artist studio. His sculptures, his objects, his installations, have always a particular trait of strangeness which concentrates the attention and arouses discussion.
Material, form and craft are always at the core in Leblon’s work, yet the artist’s refined formal language is a subtext to its critical reclaiming of the mechanics of interpretation. Leblon is able to generate a vocabulary of forms and syntax that range from the concrete to the visionary, the critical to the enigmatic, integrating symbolic, and poetical associations.
“My work is made during my movements and travels and not really in the studio, which I regard like a receptacle where the sum of all the things I collect is to be found” 1, Leblon, says. And this “movements” seem to be translated into the exhibition space, as “I want to offer the audience a certain point of view to look at the work so as to create a sense of strolling in the exhibition space, i.e. the exhibition becomes a landscape, a routing, without starting or ending point”.*
The Constant Repetition of False, Leblon’s fourth exhibition at ProjecteSD collects and integrates all these different notions found in the French artist practice in a group of new works: his ability to transform and transfigure scraps, remnants, organic elements appropriated from nature, all sort of found pieces into a visual experience; his skillful manipulation of space which allows to choreograph his works into a larger spatial narrative within the exhibition venue; the idea of fragmentation and disjunction, the sense of ephemeral, the relationship with materials, textures, surfaces, which manifests itself in works that hint at a kind of alchemy.
A series of groups of works are presented for the first time in the exhibition. Le Très Grand Rideau is a hanging sculptural installation which breaks the exhibition space. It is literally a useless curtain soaked in plaster that sort of indicates a path, a crooked route along the room which seems to hide/show an interior passage. No me llames Juan, also made with cloth and plaster, displayed on one side of the gallery, in a small semi-circular structure seems to evoke a private concealed space. Two sets of double “bas-reliefs”, La Grande Seiche and Recette, both of sculptural and pictorial quality, show the traces, the imprinted marks of some organic remains. A cuttlefish, some pieces of fruit can be recognised on the plaster bed. Like an image of a fossilized life which is no longer there. This uncanny landscape of “nature mortes” is accentuated by another set of sculptures, Le Secret I and Le Secret II, two concave metal bars anchored in the ceiling, from which a series of other perishable objects, bodily fragments and solidified pieces of clothes are collected and suspended. A reference, like in Le Très Grand Rideau to a domestic interior, the home, or maybe the studio. A landscape of objects both frozen and transient at once.
As it was pointed out by Thomas Boutoux: “Guillaume Leblon’s exhibitions become the sites of unprecedented articulations of objects, often heterogeneous but always compatible, sites with well-balanced dynamics, temporary and successive, somewhere between what is almost known and the barely known. They sketch unusual landscapes of objects and shapes where the temporalities clash, the past like the future plunging explicitly into our present”.
*Note: Some of the ideas and quotes in this press release have been extracted from the text Roadblocks by Michelle Grabner published in the book Helbling by Guillaume Leblon (Paraguay Press, 2013).