Galerie Nathalie Obadia is delighted to present PATAQUÈS, the artist Guillaume Leblon's first exhibition in his gallery in Paris, following on from The Traveller Walking on Tiptoes in Brussels last spring. After his solo exhibition, THERE IS A MAN and more at the S.M.A.K (Ghent) in 2018, the artist is currently enjoying a solo exhibition entitled PARADE at the Palais de Tokyo (Paris). As an extension of this show, PATAQUÈS presents a new set of revisited sculptures.
Living in a big city today engenders a strong impression of temporal and spatial dislocation. When Saul Anton met Guillaume Leblon in New York in 2019, the author pointed out that the incessant changes in modern times did not lead to the demise of the landscapes of yesteryear, but rather revealed "the total absence of stable ground, of a native land"¹. Mirroring a world in constant evolution, Guillaume Leblon creates new spaces, places we are yet to discover. Although the title of the exhibition PATAQUÈS evokes the association of a variety of perspectives of diverse elements, the gallery floor harmonises and brings these works together. On entering the gallery, the visitor steps onto a sculpture by simply coming into contact with the soft and supple carpeting that the artist has laid out, both the wrong and the right way up, over the entire floor space. On the one hand, this "second skin" brings the works into relation with each other and on the other it lends them autonomy by delimiting the spaces allocated to each piece. A movement made up of sensory dynamics thus accompanies the visitors' path: like a plinth awaiting its sculpture, the floor of the gallery welcomes the spectator, who in turn shares the "exhibition ground" with the works, thus placing both the visitor and the oeuvres on the same plane.
Guillaume Leblon's works are based on forms and objects from our everyday environment. A cast aluminium shell - The Death of Jennifer (2022) - presents an iridescent down jacket, lying on the ground like a fragment of the landscape that the artist might have retrieved and placed in the gallery. "There is a recurring image at the origin of this piece" Guillaume Leblon explains, "that of bodies lying on the ground in Harlem where I live, wrapped in their down jackets, stricken by the opioid addiction that has ravaged certain parts of the population of New York, especially since the confinements and massive job losses due to the Covid-19 pandemic." In the artist's sculptures, clothing is often used as a body substitute as well as a social marker, anchoring the object in the here and now. Time exerts no hold on the elements of the exhibition: the balls - embedded in the works from the series Body & Ball - are frozen in their trajectories; body parts cast in plaster are from this point forward set in their mediums. These conditions have modified the movements depicted in the immobilized elements: an interplay of resistance and opposing forces taking place between the balls and the plaster-cast body parts.
Guillaume Leblon materializes "that infinite time", close to eternity, in the connection between his works and his life experience. The Death of Mary (2022), a work currently exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo, is replicated in the gallery by The Death of Jennifer (2022). These two sculptures might be seen as symbolically linked to the Pietà, Michelangelo's iconic sculpture, where, transfixed in marble, Christ rests in the lap of the Virgin Mary before his entombment. The dramatic intensity of these works - bearing in mind that these down jackets bear witness to the wretched conditions of human life on the streets of New York - fades into the background in favour of an abiding beauty, a kind of silent contemplation captured in the material. Whether religious or pagan, each subject here is elevated to the status of a fetish object. Under the gallery's arcades, the Grands Chariots (2012-2022), in ceramic, are inspired by the Egyptian chariots depicted in high relief on the tombs of the pharaohs. In ancient Egypt, these tombs were considered as dwellings for the dead that conserved life for eternity. These Egyptian references continue in la Nageuse au repos (2013-2022). The stretched naked body could be a sleeping woman with her face covered by a book; it could also be an Egyptian cosmetics spoon - an object of uncertain function, but which is thought to have been used as a make-up holder or possibly a cult object, placed in the tombs of important individuals.
The sculptures Still Life and Portrait Nu (2022) are both draped in loose fabric, arranged so it falls in folds. In Still Life (2022), the pants - an inanimate object - magically suspended above the draped marble "pedestal table" echoes the artistic genre of the still life. The garment suggests the absence of the body while embodying the ghostly presence of a past life. Drapery, an artistic practise that originated in Ancient Greece, made it possible to conceal - while at the same time embracing - a body's nudity. In the same manner, the drapery in Portrait Nu, in the form of a bathrobe that has absorbed a certain weight of humidity, suggests its intimate relationship to the body. This sensual dimension is echoed when the video Pocket Love - filmed on a portable phone, from the pocket of a piece of clothing - is projected to completely overlay Portrait Nu: the space is completely flooded with sensuality, with the colours of barely suggested images mingling with the murmurings of loving contact.
In Guillaume Leblon's work, space is a matter of perception experienced with and through the body. By blurring all our familiar spatial and temporal certainties, the exhibition itself is transformed into a theatre, receptive to all forms of mutation, witnessing the ever-changing world in which we evolve.
Guillaume Leblon is also the curator of the exhibition OFF WATER, taking place in the gallery's Espace II and featuring a selection of works by artists represented by Galerie Nathalie Obadia.
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¹ Saul Anton, Laisser de la place, sculpter le temps, Guillaume Leblon selon Saul Anton, Translated from english by Elsa Boyer, TextWork Plateforme Éditoriale Fondation Pernod Ricard, january 2020, p.1
