Mark Leckey — Lafayette Anticipations, Paris
It’s a striking experience unfolding at Lafayette Anticipations in the heart of As Above So Below, the exhibition by Mark Leckey. Behind the festive facade and the artist’s genuine interest in gatherings and celebrations lies a strange, overwhelming momentum beyond our grasp.
A mechanical surge, an organic ballet that plays with time and returns us—powerless and awestruck—to the childlike loss, real or imagined, of the bitter end of the party. A path leading elsewhere, without us. Behind the ecstasy—used here as the primary motif—there is always the descent, a mechanical necessity grafted onto the cogs of fantastic transports. As high as it is low, as the exhibition’s title suggests, both unexpected and precise with the ritual’s regularity. Hence the lasting presence of the fairground and its spectacular trail in our memories.
With a sequential exhibition that activates his works one after another or integrates them into a larger whole, Mark Leckey places us as spectators of a time we cannot control. He challenges our capacity not only for attention but also for adapting to the codes of a social life that we’re unsure whether we feed—or whether it feeds on us. This is a conscious echo of the esoteric poetry of opposites found in the Emerald Tablet, that foundational text of alchemical literature which, through a curiously direct logic, links earth and sky, the whole and the singular.
Without being limited to it, yet clearly drawing inspiration from it—toward a necessary immanence—everything here is a sign, a symbol of time and times. It’s an immersive experience that undeniably leaves a mark, but also disorients, guaranteeing a path that changes with every visit, always confounding despite its multitude of cues and inscriptions.
What coexists here is a singular blend of simplicity and complexity, a specialist’s attention to what many scholars might choose to overlook, a time-consuming passion for one’s own lost time—translated in some works as a kind of creative epiphany that cannot leave one untouched. From traces of an inherently ephemeral event orchestrated by the artist to his fantastic temporal reconstructions through concert footage he once attended, Leckey offers us an entry point into a life and a popular culture with wildly unexpected, intriguing ramifications.
The journey, as demanding as it is open-ended, stands as a bold undertaking within the current exhibition landscape and reflects immense respect for an artist who deserves it—pushing his thinking to the very edges of thought itself to reexamine the act of creation.
His inspiring, deliberately ambiguous melancholy does more than sublimate the everyday; it dissolves it into a hazy zone, keeping it suspended—fractal in its reverence for the ordinary, and reaching, in the style of medieval perspectives, to illuminate the structures of our reality and diagonally reinterpret the symbols of our daily life.
Mark Leckey, As Above So Below, Lafayette Anticipations — Fondation Galeries Lafayette, 9, rue du Plâtre, 75004 Paris — From wednesday to sunday, from 11 am to 7 pm
