On a filament
September 15 – October 15, 2020
Le 6, Mandel
Paris| FRANCE
Anne Laval / Lucas Weinachter
Sculpture, engraving / drawing
Meeting of two artists, with the thread as a conductor.
Curators of the exhibition : Galerie Nathalie Béreau + (S)itor
Exhibition
Presentation
Anne Laval
The exhibition presents a selection of suspended sculptures Landscape of Dust, Ash and Dust, and small sculptures from the series Du bout des doigts where steel wool is sculpted. In his suspended volumes, the steel wool is floating in space like a horizon line in the mist, an evanescent cloud more or less dense that the ink covering the steel wool, will accentuate or on the contrary lighten certain masses.
The Fossil Landscapes created in 2016 as part of a solo exhibition at the Montormel Memorial (Orne), and presented at 6, Mandel (outdoor and indoor sculptures) are the result of a reflection by the artist on the history of the World War II memorial and the surrounding landscape. Imbued with the past horror, the sculptures taken out of this particular context, have a plastic strength such that they can also be discovered for the strange beauty they give off. Working with porcelain as the imprint of the hilly landscape that inspired the artist, Anne Laval has fashioned her sculptures like a puzzle: piece by piece, each raw porcelain element is inlaid with copper before firing, creating an evocative greenish oxidation – underlying the translucent material.
After firing, the landscape and its history is then recreated, each piece being sewn with a steel wire, each stitch requiring the turning over of the entire sculpture. The gesture is therefore essential, meticulous, with a slow rhythm, rediscovering the work of the little hands of haute couture!
But the thread is not that of sewing, but of repair as for the wounded objects that we find in African art. The artist, by this cauterization, dresses the wounds, repairs, heals in a symbolic way the wound for a new life where the memory of the trauma becomes a living source of luminous creation to share.
Monotypes (hair, ink and embossing) entitled Nests of dust from 2014, complete the selection of works exhibited.
These engravings proceed from the imprint of the artist’s hair inked, diverted waste, principle of recycling and questioning our body dust, sublimated by the artist’s gesture in illusory volutes.
Nathalie Béreau, 2016
Lucas Weinachter
followed his passion for drawing without hesitation and forgot the architecture he was destined for at the Beaux Arts de Paris. The precise and supported rigor of the line is omnipresent in his work and always lets appear the skeleton of the imagined structure, stories told in dotted lines, situations always dreamlike where his anonymous characters are our own reflection.
The fragility of the supports used, most often natural Japanese paper, light, textured, alive, fragile and elastic like a skin on which, the lead pencil, the charcoal or the ink come, like a tattoo, to leave their imprint. It is the real fragility of our world but the glance carried is far from being serious. If nothing is perfect, the dotted or freely suspended threads open by their movement the universe of possible dreams. Without thinking of Picasso, Braque, or Max Ernst, one can evoke the Birds of the artist Cornelius with big round eyes like marbles!
The body is omnipresent in the works presented here, inside/outside, above/below, hidden/secret, real/imagined… it is a precise, medical and psychic exposure of our intimate workings. The anatomical drawing is never far away, always completed and extended by seams in cotton thread to be embroidered, as many references to the usual codes of the genre (myology, blood vessels, nervous system), to finally impose a geography of the intimate where fantasies and detour of meaning are mixed. Lucas loves this thread, and uses it more and more, marking the stigmata of a life that is made and unmade, the breaks to be glued back together, the imperfections to be mended, the anomalies to be masked, underlining the point, accentuating the movement… This thread that naturally leads us to abandonment, introspection, and Baudelairian reverie.
Sitor Senghor, July 2016