Lionel Sabatté

For this solo exhibition, the MAMC+ is offering Lionel Sabatté a carte blanche on more than 600 m². The work of this French artist, who lives between Paris and Los Angeles, explores the transformation of matter and its incarnation in a strange bestiary ranging from packs of wolves born of dust, crocodiles covered with innumerable scales of coins and tiny owls built from nail clippings. In Saint-Étienne, some fifty works have been created specifically for the exhibition, including sculptures, paintings, rust paintings on metal sheets, installations and drawings, alternating between bronze, concrete and skin.

In its journey, the exhibition is shaped by a cosmogony unfolds that is specific to the artist’s visual universe, at once organic, vegetable and animal. The cycles of life exist side by side, bearing a perpetual resurrection of all matter. Thus, in the entrance hall, an ancient chestnut tree from Saint-Étienne, defeated by drought, observes a new bloom; while further on fields of fertile birds, like stalagmites, cohabit with the carcasses of their own kind. Between the two, the “oxidation cave” withits gilded, rusty and greenish telluric surfaces, inviting the visitor into an initiatory immersion in the subterranean depths. The journey proposed by Lionel Sabatté begins in a primeval magma and moves through several blossomings, surveying the phenomenon organic lives.

The human figure, emerging in a second chapter, struggles to impose itself in this itinerary that could be likened to the earth formation cycles. Fragmentary, dismembered, formed of assembled rubble, it seeks both to construct itself and to limit its ruin. The off-centre,precariously balanced figures form a dialogue with the immense Wall of openings. An assemblage of cement and concrete iron, the wall forms a body-like membrane that divides the space as much as it associates its various sides. In this site-specific installation, the proposed breaches give different points of view on a tangle of structures, the remnants of a stranded construction, awaiting a new destination.

At the very end of the exhibition, a large square of translucent fabric, formed of thousands of skins, resonates with the multiple faces, barely sketched on paper, made of assembled hair and dust. Suspended and left exposed to the light passing through the room, this receptacle of energy concludes an itinerary that the artist intends to be alchemical and ascending. According to Lionel Sabatté, the works gathered here are like vehicles, small vessels that allow the visitor to move through time and space, from geological strata to the present moment, on a path from earth to the sky.