Organismes et Fantasma / Lionel Sabatté

Working with the material itself, thinking about its thickness, harvesting what it offers with its share of unforeseen events. Gleaning a thousand elements from the world and transforming them into representations, leading these same elements to interact, to dialogue, to metamorphose as if to better reveal the incredible variety of life. Dust, scraps, fragments, improbable pigments, threads, are all the flesh of Lionel Sabatté's paintings, drawings, sculptures or reliefs. And each time the same idea, to put the representation at risk of itself as if to better indicate that what is to be seen is only a simple stage in the slow germination process of the living. So the spectator may well see a hybrid bestiary made up of birds, bears, eels, wolves, delicate monsters which together expose their flesh and their skeletons, their fluids and their appearances. Lionel Sabatté refuses to accept the obvious, with a tenderness for the uncertain, leading to a unique blend of mineral, animal and organic. There are rejections, scraps, residues, but above all rebirth and a form of reincarnation perceptible in the elegance of the line, the colours and the materials. 

We find this strength in his latest work, produced in February and April 2021 during a residency at Urdla in Villeurbanne, a place dedicated to printmaking and which is widely presented in this exhibition. As usual, Lionel Sabatté has seized upon techniques to better bend them to his world of metamorphosis and suspense. Everything starts with a line, and the desire to let a being, a plant emerge... As usual, the artist twists conventions, using an old zinc sheet from the roof of his studio as a background, having fun disrupting techniques, constraining them to better enter a world where everything becomes possible through the experimental gesture. The artist lets himself be taken in by the game, evacuating the possibility of renewing his gesture, of renewing a rendering. Plates, papers, textile scraps, all superimposed, repositioned, pressed, enhanced by other inks, other lines, then pressed again and finally enhanced by hand in his Parisian studio, far from the place of his first experiments. In other words, each work is totally unique, illuminated by swirling but precise strokes, by muted inks, colours of the earth and humus. In these small or large monotypes, the eye is then free to perceive the appearance of chimeras or glyphs, to see a bestiary of animals from the abyss or from our dreams, or even in some cases a simple human profile drowned in a maelstrom of materials. Rarely has Lionel Sabatté so intertwined the marvellous and the delicate appearance of living forms. 

Lionel Sabatté's solo exhibition "Organismes and Fantasma" from 25 September to 6 November 2021 at the gallery will also be the occasion to present a new spectacular production of the artist magnifying with oxides, one of his photographs of undergrowth silk-screened on a metal plate.