Guillaume Lebelle — Pan — Christophe Gaillard Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 9 → May 11, 2013

Guillaume Lebelle à la galerie Christophe Gaillard Pour sa deuxième exposition personnelle à la galerie Christophe Gaillard, Guillaume Lebelle a choisi de présenter les productions d... 3 - Bravo Critique

Improvise a sonata

There is a possible parallel between music and the workshop practice of Guillaume Lebelle. He is primarily concerned with the written music, classical and contemporary, but he does not use the notation to play but his accidental memory. Behind a classic spirit is perhaps an improviser. And there is therefore no coincidence that Joelle Leandre has been invited to play in one of his exhibitions: formed in the interpretation, the virtuoso execution, she has always ventured into the land of experimentation without a compass.

Sometimes the better and the more intense space for the world experimentation is the workshop. Beyond the mythology built on the intricacies of creation, the workshop is the junction place between reflection and practice, laboratory and game — it breaks down the boundaries that are too linear between impulsive pleasure and critical distance. Because, paradoxically, it does not allow too much recoil. The workshop does not attempt to look at the company or the art from a distanced perspective — this famous ivory tower — it rather requires delving into febrile, nervous and contradictory intensities.

Guillaume Lebelle is bringing the world into his painting by more troubles paths, more unspeakable ones, from which he does not seek to master the effects. Maybe this is the reason why he likes to get lost in bookstores reading at the discretion of chosen chances? Notwithstanding a strong literary culture, which draws a map including Nicolas Gogol, Christophe Tarkos and Andrea Tarkos Zanzotto, discussed here in some titles of the paintings, he likes to be seized by the perplexity using a language he doesn’t know, the image of Chinese calligraphy. And what better definition of abstraction that this perplexity there. The painting behaves in sounding cases where sources that were not made to be introduced, meet — as some sonatas of Haydn with an unpredictable mounting.

Writers, filmmakers and artists — often envied abstract qualities of music — from Goethe to Hans Richter or Paul Klee — but again, Guillaume Lebelle is less looking for a supposed liberation of the senses than giving a sensual quality to his painting. To do this, he enrolls different gesture speeds on canvases that he first works without frame, so that you can run your eyes without hierarchy between the top and bottom, the left and right.

And during this process, he does not attempt to remove stains, drips, rage and the confusion of a doubt, an earthquake. Painting and drawing merge, there is no definitive solutions because there are no solutions in painting, asserts itself here as a sensitive plate for states necessarily transient.

On the spot

In this game of balances, gaps, or rather silences, participate in the composition of a sonata made of signs and indices. Spacing thus leave visible the raw canvas, which seeks to “catch the around”.

A series of recent photographs can further disturb what we take for granted in the work of Guillaume Lebelle. To accomplish them, he went to the extreme opposite of his studio in Paris, to a beach of the cliffs of Normandy. There he almost played like a child to compose a player sculpture, dancing, detaching from a rock. The photos are different views of the same sculpture: we turn around them. In this side too there is something to do with the choreography. He recalls his interest for the drawings of the choreographer Trisha Brown. In this step dancing, this deviation from its usual practice, he would almost confess a passion for agility not only of the gesture but also of the body volume. An openness to other cliffs, challenges that it will always want to propose to himself.