Guillaume Leblon holds a singular place as a
young French artist. Up to 1997, he studied at
the National Art School in Lyon; since then he
has mostly lived abroad and exhibited in
Holland, Belgium, Italy and Germany.
Consequently, his work has constantly faced up
to different cultures without ever adhering to any
particular artistic tendency. However, his way of
proceeding and the precision of his installations
also appear to be shared by certain of his
contemporaries in France
(1), who also for the most
part work abroad. Born between 1970 and 1975,
these artists are less concerned with the past
generation's interest in finding new modes of
production, in de-routing economic systems, or in
social “effectiveness”; instead they refer back to
pictorial abstraction, modern architecture,
American sculpture of the 60's, conceptual art,
process art, Structuralist cinema… taking an
approach which may vary in formal terms but
stems from a common concept: the art work is a
clue, however slight it may be, that opens on to a
spectrum of references, a construction, a story,
an entire world.
This clue-like character is fundamental to
Guillaume Leblon's work as a whole, as well as to
the process by which he thinks out each individual
work. In his peculiar way, he will retain a minor
detail of some place he has visited or lived in, then
present it somewhat like a piece of a puzzle which
allows you to mentally construct the larger significance
of the assembled whole. This is a way to
read the architectural fragments in works such as
Equipment (2002) installed at the Arti Museum,
Amsterdam, or
Elévation (2002) at the MAC in
Lyon, and more recently
Mur Barasti (2003) in
the exhibition
AZIMUT at the Frac Bourgogne, a
reconstruction in wallboard of the roof of a house
designed by the Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy,
adjusted to the scale of the exhibition space. Most
of Leblon's works appear as emblematic clues
that lead you through hypothetical narratives.
Take, for example,
Contact (2000) where filler is
used to repair the heels of a pair of shoes. By treating
the pair of shoes in this way, the artist is pointing
out how worn they are – he is materialising their
history.
Volume d'intérieur (2004), included in
AZIMUT is another example related to the idea of
the clue: the simple presence of a rolled carpet in
the middle of the exhibition space introduces a
temporal aspect that seemingly relates to the
space in its former state – in other words, to the
preceding exhibition.
When these clues, however restrained they may be,
take the form of images, they go beyond the proposed
narrative field – that is, beyond the spatial and temporal
framework of the picture. The two photographs
entitled
Chapelle (2002) present views of
warehouses in which furniture and objects have
been mysteriously stored. By suggesting some future
use for these contents, the temporal framework of
the actual picture is broadened.
Guillaume Leblon's 16-mm films also serve to
expand the frame, referring to what is located offscreen.
By panning slowly over a row of flooded
houses in
April Street (2001), he makes you feel
that the flood extends to infinity. The new film
presented in
AZIMUT has a similar function.The main
feature – a streak of lighting – shifts to another
feature, the light coming from a house on a hill.
The sequence underlines the relationship between
the presence of facts or things and their disappearance.
The streak of lightning could be emblematic
of this, especially since its flash, echoed in the
phenomenological nature of film, is accentuated
by the lighting provided throughout the exhibition.
In the context of such a dialectic of presence and
absence, the state of fullness defined by the spaces
and objects Guillaume Leblon creates is inevitably
related to the void formed within their contours.
Thus, as is often the case with the artist, the work
in the Frac show entitled Contours (2000) – a
neon outline of a chandelier – is a play on container
and content. In the film
Villa Cavroix (2000),
the artist's camera skims over the decrepit walls
of Robert Mallet-Stevens' villa, making the exterior
volume of the abandoned structure exist within
mental space. On the other hand, for the installation
Interior-façade (2001) presented at Public> in
Paris, Leblon raised the floor and remodelled the
existing walls of the space by erasing the interior
and transforming it into a single full volume with
new contours.
Windows appear frequently in Guillaume Leblon's
work; they are contours of another sort, serving to
link interior and exterior. In
AZIMUT, vapour seeps
through the baseboard of one of the rooms
(
qi, 2003) and a small opening has been pierced in
a wall of the Frac supposedly for a dog to enter
from the neighbouring garden. Both these works
play on introducing the outdoors indoors.
However, a window is something that opens on to
the world. It opens a domestic space onto a cosmos,
which the artist reduces to primary elements: a
trickle of rain for
Essai gris (2000) at W139 in
Amsterdam, or two fires for
Ordinaries (2000).
Guillaume Leblon's art cultivates a meaningful
relationship with the physical world and with
natural phenomena in various states, particularly
climatic ones influenced by factors of time and
chance. In his recent works especially, the exterior
world is re-transcribed into clues – smoke, lightning,
the presence of a dog – which evoke an elementary,
uncontrolled state that contrasts with the
domestic aspect of other works.
In the context of a show like
AZIMUT, such clues
help to expand the parameters of the space, and to
open the mind to an elsewhere. Guillaume Leblon
sees the exhibition as an occasion for folding,
reversing and switching acts, generated by the
works that function as mental projections or as
transitions from one state to another, from less to
more. This is how the 3 x 4 m poster
Bleu-nuit
infini (2004), a monochrome of the sky at night,
should be interpreted, its apparent simplicity evoking
iconic depth and intensity.
In
The Poetics of Space (1957), Gaston
Bachelard speaks of the possible relationships between
the intimate and the infinite, microcosm and
macrocosm, and more specifically between the
miniature and the immense. Although his reflections
apply mainly to poetry, the sensitivity of his
writing is relevant to Guillaume Leblon's
approach. In the chapter “Miniatures”, Bachelard
tries to link “the immensity of the world to the
depth of the space within”; he defends a "phenomenology
of extension, expansion, ecstasy, in short
a phenomenology of the prefix”: “(…)
Sometimes the transactions of the great
and small echo and multiply. When a familiar
image grows as big as the sky, we suddenly
feel that familiar objects become miniatures
of a world. Macrocosms and microcosms are
correlative.”
(2)
A number of Guillaume Leblon's works function
in a similar way.
Present (2002), is a
paper bag containing an indoor plant, emblematic
of a condensed virgin forest. Apparently
minimal and opaque,
Trunks (2000) consists of
chests containing all the artist's belongings
from his studio at the Rijkakademie in
Amsterdam. Reconstituted in a new version for
AZIMUT, the chests symbolically contain the
vast amounts of materials and mental matter
brought together for the exhibition. These thus
serve as a metaphor for the updating of the
artist's work.
More interestingly still, the work
Models in a
box (2003) is a cardboard box containing scale
models of works, some of which have been realised,
others not,mixed in with hybrid objects of different
scales.The models are prototypes evoking architectural
fragments, landscapes (a piece of plaster
with a fold in it recalling mountain scenery),
hemispheres (a world map by Buckminster
Füller).They appear as attempts to tame nature,
as is the case with the sheet of paper which has
been rolled up into a ball and whose creases
have been remodelled by the artist. As the title
indicates, each of these miniatures is a model.
They are placed in boxes representing the full
exhibition model. Contemporaneous with the
elaboration of
AZIMUT, Models in a box represents
a prefix to Leblon's work, that is to say a
pre-visualisation of Guillaume Leblon's act of
exhibiting.
Typical of Guillaume Leblon's way of working,
Models in a box creates a tension between different
states of the same object.
Mur Barasti, which
features in this model of the Frac show, exists on
different scales – in the form of a folded piece of
paper inside the model or life-size in his studio.
This question of scale is at the core of Guillaume
Leblon's concepts; it determines not only the relationship
of each work to the others or to the exhibition
space, but also of the artist to the world. In
AZIMUT, these “miniatures of the world” correspond
to a horizon traced by the exhibition itself.
1. I am thinking here of artists of the same generation such as Dove
Allouche,
Isabelle Cornaro,
Marie-Jeanne Hoffner, Gyan Panchal,
Evariste Richer, Bojan Sarcevic...
2. Presses universitaires de France, Quadrige, 8th edition, 2001. p. 157.
Marianne Lanavère is an independent curator based in Paris. Her
recent projects include
Densité ±0 at the Fine Arts School in Paris and
at Fri-art in Fribourg in 2004, conceived collaboratively with Caroline
Ferreira d'Oliveira. She has shown Leblon's work in 2003 at fa projects
in London (
Suspendu) and at the Contemporary Art Centre in Vilnius
(
Le Parc. Constructions inside out).