While all artists are a bit like magicians, for some, the relationship with matter and its transformation amounts to a true transmutation. For example, Lionel Sabatté paints using oxidation, sculpts reinforced concrete, and breathes new life into dust, skin remnants, and dead trees. hatching of forms and materials transcending the boundaries of art and the trivial, of the beautiful and the abject, exhibited at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Saint-Etienne.
Ten years after exhibiting in the Great Gallery of Evolution at the National Museum of Natural History, his Meute of wolves made of dust on a metal structure, Lionel Sabatté was once again invited to work as part of the FIAC Hors les Murs program (the work can be seen at the Tuileries).
Born in 1975, the artist, who works between Paris and Los Angeles, immediately placed the sphere of the living and the transformations of matter due to the passage of time at the heart of his work and his questioning: “How does a so-called inanimate substance become something that can be born, reproduce, die and disappear, which are the three aspects of the definition of life in biology […] where lies the boundary between what we define as living and what is not, because in fact everything transforms, everything is connected […].” 1
Emblematic of this quest: dead trees (bonsai, ash, mulberry, chestnut…) re-flowered with dead skin… No less unsettling is the elegant white square that magnificently closes the exhibition, composed of a varnished scattering of these same dead skins collected from podiatrists and meticulously glued, first in the solitude of lockdown and then in a collective setting, until they form a Fabric organic (and social) as fascinating as it is repugnant.
Another transgression of representation participating in this idea of perpetual transformation, of circulation between bodies and materials via degradation, and of regeneration, hybridization and fragmentation appear as fundamental in the plastic vocabulary of Lionel Sabatté.
While, in his flamboyant polyptychs seemingly emerging from the bowels of the Earth, he plays with the alteration by oxidation of metal plates to inscribe in these telluric partitions "the mutability of each thing at each moment" – as well as the "moving stain" giving rise, in a series of drawings, to embryonic forms and mutant figures – his monotypes 2 Born from the improbable concretion of old zinc plates, papers and superimposed textile scraps, pressed, impregnated and enhanced with inks, they reveal the germination of forms of life through that of the line, oscillating between form and formlessness, to bring forth chimeric organisms.
Baptized Fragments, His "human figures," on the other hand, are more like ruins than anatomy: made up of an aggregate of cement, tow, rebar and pigments, these imperfect, truncated, atrophied bodies, kneeling in an unstable balance, seeming close to falling over, represent, according to their author, "man in the process of building himself, in his attempt to stand upright": "It seems to me that we are just as much on the side of construction as we are on the side of ruin." »
- Excerpt from the interview between Lionel Sabatté and Aurélie Voltz, director of the MAMC in Saint-Étienne and curator of the exhibition, in the exhibition catalogue.
- “Organisms and Phantasma,” a series of monotypes on display at Galerie 8+4 until November 6. Galerie 8+4 – 38, rue de Turin, 75008 Paris
Exhibition “Lionel Sabatté – Emergence”
Until January 2, 2022
At the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Saint-Etienne
mamc.saint-etienne.fr
– Scaffolding
Jacques Villeglé Space
Place François-Truffaut, 95210 Saint-Gratien
From October 7 to December 11, 2021
– Possible Remains of our Future
Ceysson & Bénétière Gallery
956 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10021 – USA
From November 10 to 18 December 2021
By Stéphanie Dulout
