Sébastien Le Guen Paysages Humains

Exhibition

Collage, painting, mixed media

Sébastien Le Guen Paysages Humains

Past: October 13 → November 24, 2012

Painter above all, Sébastien Le Guen’s work also consists from digging into directory of images related to the publicity, communication and the world of fashion. In his work artist examines subjects often related to identity building (particularly fashion in a broad sense of the term, as the reflection of our identity), and uses, on his canvases, visual methods that play on our perception of images as much as on our imaginative faculties. Images derived from the popular iconography of mass media are diverted, torn out, decomposed, ripped, cut up and then finely redistributed on canvas or paper crossing different mediums borrowed particularly from the street painting (lettrism, spray paint, fluorescent paint, ink, stencil and collage) in order to “offer the viewer reading through the lens of his own sensibility”, dixit artist.

Under the title Paysages humains (“Human Landscapes”), Sébastien Le Guen presents a new phase of his plastic and graphic researches at the galerie Addict, between representation and abstraction, centering around the human body and its relationship with the outside world: the human body seen as the microcosm reflection of macrocosm. Faces created from metamorphosis or hybridization, forms associated and interlinked, Sébastien Le Guen’s portraits are open for questioning. We don’t really know if the figure is being built or destroyed to be rebuilt again… From the diversity of mediums (raw poster fragments, pictures from magazines, stickers, etc.) “mixed” with the painted parts of the canvas, new identities are born, which are strangely fascinating, revealing our own conscious or subconscious sensibility to the outside world.

In parallel to these “modern chimeras”, artist uses stencil and collage, declining a myriad of crossing silhouettes in multiple positions like a camera zooming out. These silhouettes are pushed together, split, overlapping, entwined. Forest of silhouettes, always feminine by their forms and bearings, painter approaches them as studies for the simplification of forms, producing textures, lines and colors. The model, her face, her body weight, as well as her position and the landscape behind are less important. Stenciled bodies enhanced with bright colors stand out against the background of the canvas. Surgical fragments are parts, where runs of paint are forming veins, and where raw canvas appears as skin surface. Other unidentified bodies occupy paper silhouettes by the collage. The technique is precise and systematic. Each collage is made from a magazine, pages being meticulously chosen by the artist in search of the feminine postures connected with a document on the reverse side of which is another “body”. Isolated, cut up with scalpel, reversed and then glued, the silhouette becomes an inner landscape.

On each side, in these urban, natural, architectural, painted bodies of unspecified objects, in these silhouettes on the canvas multiplying like human cells, something not only of a visible but also of a sensitive nature takes place.

With “Paysages humains”, artist offers projective journey between dream and poetry to the galerie Addict, a hand-to-hand of colors and forms, giving its maximum range to the word “curiosity”.

Sébastien Le Guen is a French painter, living in Paris. Born in 1971, he exposed himself as an artist at the Villa Arson, in the 1990’s. Since then, his work has been presented within personal and collective exhibitions, in France as well as abroad: Geneva (MAMCO), Belgium, United States… His exhibition “Le monde pansé” earned him the Villa Médicis Hors les Murs Prize in 2004. Close to the Bad painting, at the crossroads of several influences, particularly that of Martin Kippenberger (Sébastien worked as his assistant) Sébastien Le Guen’s pictorial practice borrows from the pop culture, punk and trash of the years 80-90, as well as from the surrealism and the spirit of Dada.

Déborah Boltz
  • Opening Saturday, October 13, 2012 6 PM → 9 PM
Addict Gallery Gallery
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03 Le Marais Zoom in 03 Le Marais Zoom out

14-16, rue de Thorigny

75003 Paris

T. 01 48 87 05 04

www.addictgalerie.com

Saint-Sébastien – Froissart

Opening hours

Tuesday – Saturday, 11 AM – 7 PM

The artist

  • Sébastien Le Guen