Guillaume Leblon
À dos de cheval avec le peintre (On Horseback with the Painter)
6 June–24 August 2014
Opening: June 5, 6:30pm
Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes
11 rue Docteur Dolard
69100 Villeurbanne
France
Hours: Wednesday–Sunday 1–7pm
After having associated him with various collective exhibitions, (Fabricateurs d’Espaces, 2008; 1966–79, 2013), the IAC is now inviting Guillaume Leblon to produce a major monographic exhibition.
With a rich and intuitive vocabulary, Guillaume Leblon presents structures that appear basic and that modify our perception of time and space. The artist highlights the physical potentialities of the forms and materials he uses, which seem to become permeated by the passage of time, in both its atmospheric and memorial dimensions. The intervention of the artist’s “hand” and the importance that he places on “doing” in the general sense, are inscribed within the works—moving, piecing together, moulding, agglomerating, burying etc.—giving Guillaume Leblon’s sculpture vital energy and narrative potential.
À dos de cheval avec le peintre (On Horseback with the Painter) is an exhibition devised by the artist as a promenade. This polyphonic, elegant, and free title conjures up landscapes to roam among, a rhythmic path and an enlightened gaze—all things that linger in the folds of Guillaume Leblon’s work. The artist totally invests the IAC space, a restricted space in which he defies rigidity, symmetry, and enclosure, with the idea of creating fluid circulation, a circular movement. Thus, in Guillaume Leblon’s exhibition, the centre is not the centre, the exterior becomes interior, masses are shapeless, while surfaces become dense, and artworks traverse walls or infiltrate floors.
The artist’s sensitive relationship to the elements and to the passage of time permeates the works and embodies the materials, involving a subjective appropriation for everyone. The exhibition space “lives” and is transformed, it seeps, breathes, and consolidates itself; what is visible is not always what we see, in the sense that it is the artist’s role to activate the work and the gaze, to inscribe the idea of transition within the very conception of the work. This fundamental instability in no way precludes extreme care being applied to the arrangement of the works, the understanding of the materials, the meanings of gestures, the treatment of light, and the language of forms.
In Guillaume Leblon’s exhibition, visitors walk on an artwork, leave the IAC to visit the exhibition, and cross footbridges. They allow themselves to be hypnotised by latent forms, discerning the shapes of objects nestled within materials, recalling a visit to a mastaba or constructing a narrative based on fragments.
Guillaume Leblon resists simplifying discourses as much as the enclosure of forms, developing a new sculptural landscape that favours a poetic relationship to space and the world—an active, mobile, open relationship, with questions concerning time, absence, and memory recurring in the artist’s recent works. Unlike some of his previous works, these new works are not so much within the register of the gesture as they are the result of collage operations: a new family of works from which human and animal figures sometimes emerge.
Guillaume Leblon was born in Lille in 1971. He has shown his work internationally for the past decade, with recent solo exhibitions held at: MASS MoCA, USA, 2014; Musée de Sérignan, 2012; Le Grand Café, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Saint-Nazaire, 2010; MUDAM, Luxembourg, 2009; CGAC, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 2008; STUK, Leuven, 2008; and Crédac / Galerie Fernand Léger, Ivry-sur-Seine, 2006. He has also participated in numerous collective exhibitions including Les Prairies, Biennale de Rennes, 2012; Pour un Art Pauvre, Carré d’Art, Nimes, 2011; Une Terrible Beauté Est Née, Biennale de Lyon, 2011 and Constellation, Centre Pompidou–Metz, 2009.
Curator:
Nathalie Ergino (Director of the IAC, Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes)
Assisted by Magalie Meunier
Press contact:
Fanny Martin: f.martin [at] i-ac.eu / T + 33 (0) 4 78 03 47 72
The Institut d’art contemporain gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ministry of Culture and Communication (DRAC Rhône-Alpes), the Rhône-Alpes Region and the City of Villeurbanne.
