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10/4/2008

Guillaume Leblon

Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea CGAC, Santiago de Compostela

The work presented by Guillaume Leblon (Lille, France, 1971) in Parallel Walk is related to nineteen-seventies conceptual or systemic art. His works are not so much objectual, but rather elements used to construct, question and explore reality. For this reason, he tends to shy away from positivist arguments in favour of operations that affect the poetic quality of experience. His "working method" is not demonstrative or scientific, but rather interrogative. To "probe," in the work of Guillaume Leblon, is not tantamount to finding an answer; rather it means exploring a phenomenon.

This is why it is difficult to situate his work in the authorized and sanctioned realm of contemporary artistic production, and it is even more difficult to classify it into one of the specific categories into which recent art history has been divided. Surely, in his production we are able to single out installations that are often conceived for a particular exhibition venue, objects, photographs, films and performances. But these rough categories can hardly account for the subtle nuances of his work, since he moves in many different fields, as confirmed by the artist himself: "Each work will be alternatively a drawing, a model, a figure, an image, or a ruin. The relationships which will be established between the viewer and the works continually alter in status. The organization of the material and the archetypal figures of habitat (wall, furniture, window, garden) disturb the hierarchy between the finished object and its beginning stages. At the outside entrance, I"d like to display Punishment, an ice cube which will have the size of one stone slab. On top of the ice cube will be a coin or a small metal piece."

Indeed, located at the entrance to the exhibition, Punishment (2008) presents several aspects of the ensemble being shown that must be taken into account - the relationship of the different works with the specific architecture of the Santiago museum, the tension between the presence of the works and the structural arrangement of the expository space, the evasive quality of many of his pieces, the impossibility of fully grasping them, the relationship between the interior and the exterior, the performatic quality of his work and the artist"s interest in changes, transformations and the marks left by the performance actions as well as the mutations, alterations and manipulations inherent to the materials, objects and spaces used. This piece, so very characteristic of his production, opens the way to other more well-known works such as L"arbre (2005), Olives (2006) and Notes (2007), that share the generic traits mentioned above. While all the aforementioned works have been created for previous exhibitions, on this occasion they have been installed in keeping with the specificity of the CGAC museum. The exhibition is completed with a group of brand new pieces, which have been conceived with the building in mind - its special volumetric, spatial and structural conditions and its sinuous, fragmented rhythm.

L"arbre is a real tree trunk that has been treated and painted dark grey and topped off with artificial foliage that was taken from a Ginkgo biloba tree. The leaves, originally green in colour, were covered by the artist with a coat of paint ranging from greyish black to white. The tree"s artificial nature is readily perceived by the spectator. From the way the branches are attached to the tree trunk, it is clear that the artist had no intention of imitating a real, recognisable tree. Rather he wanted to make it have the "appearance" of a tree. His choice of leaves from the ginkgo tree stems from the rather unusual history of this botanical specimen, (this tree, which has not mutated in the last 250 million years, is considered to be a living fossil and has been preserved in the gardens of the monasteries deep in the heart of China) and from its special characteristics (it is the only species that survived the explosion of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and its therapeutic properties are currently being studied). Its presence - stunning and impressive - in the CGAC foyer keeps the spectator at a distance, forcing him/her to consider the whole and not the details, which are often disappointing since they do not pursue plausibility or the technical expertise of hyperrealistic simulation. The treatment of the tree and its arrangement uproots the object from the place and transforms it into an image where fiction is introduced. In L"arbre you can feel the pulsating tension - dual and contradictory -, which is characteristic of all of Leblon"s works - between nature and culture, reality and fiction, weight and lightness, surface and density and between the interior and the exterior.

The work of Guillaume Leblon deals with the reality that surrounds us - with the objects, landscape, space and architecture. So, in La Palissade, Landscape, Common Heat as well as Unknown Group (all of which were produced in 2008), we can see references to the Galician landscape, to elements from the world of agriculture and clearly recognisable household objects. But the work scheme the artist has applied to these realities is not of a naturalist type. It is not a question of depicting what is happening, but rather to provide tools for the perception of what is happening behind the appearance of things. And this perception is always accompanied by a kind of probing that seeks to interiorise different levels of knowledge.

His works do not reveal inaccessible realities, but everyday realities, although far removed from daily, physical perception. This drift from the usual perception of what is perceived in everyday life (whether it is the space or the object) is generated by actions that interrupt the schemes in which this reality functions. La Chasse (2008), for instance, is resolved with long strips of glass suspended vertically between the floor and the ceiling; these glass strips are slightly warped owing to the effect of their lightness and the fragile consistency of the glass. It is an ordinary, commonplace material; its properties are well known. But arranged in such a simple way, it triggers perceptive responses that annul the mechanisms we use to recognise an object, and consequently, the world.

Guillaume Leblon influences the world with ideas that are as direct as they are effective and as simple as they are poetic, and they succeed in broadening the horizons of what is familiar to us and the way in which we recognise our surroundings.

Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea CGAC
Valle Inclán s/n
15704 Santiago de Compostela
Hours:
Tuesday – Sunday: 11:00-20:00. Monday: Closed.
Handicapped Access
To schedule a guided tour, you can request information by mail or by telephone.

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