A Rousing Conversation with Léonard Martin
Toutes les images/All images:© Courtesy de l'artiste et TEMPLON, Paris—Brussels—NewYork
Born in 1991 in Paris, Léonard Martin currently lives and works in the French capital. After studying at Beaux-Arts de Paris (graduating in 2015 with first class honours) and Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains (graduating in 2017 with first class honours), he showed his work at the Salon de Montrouge, Jeune Création and La Villette in Paris and Collection Lambert in Avignon.
In 2018-2019, he was artist-in-residence at the French Academy in Rome at the Villa Medici. His other prizes and residencies include the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in 2019, the ADAGP Digital Art – Video Art Revelation prize in 2017, Prix Dauphine from Université Paris-Dauphine in 2018, and Lafayette Anticipations in 2021. His work was exhibited at the Collection Lambert in Avignon in 2017, La Villette in Paris, the Gwangju Biennale in Korea, Villa Emerige in Paris, and Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2018, and Palais de Tokyo in Paris and Lyon Biennale in 2019.
I had the pleasure of asking Léonard about how art helps him to understand the layers and meaning of life, what other painting techniques he wants to explore, and so much more.
UZOMAH: Where do you see your work evolving in the future? Are there any new themes or mediums that you hope to explore?
LEONARD: I aspire to a choral form of art in which the exhibition is conceived like an opera libretto. I'd like the exhibition to bring together my forays into different disciplines: painting, sculpture, video, installation and performance. At the heart of it all, I believe, will always be the practice of drawing, which I see as an original stage, an infancy of art. For me, drawing, particularly of the human body, is the most spontaneous form of expression. I'm drawn to artists and authors who share this impossible quest for exhaustiveness, because they seek to construct a world in its entirety, a complete ecosystem. Great works go beyond their finiteness because they seem to suggest that the conditions set out are sufficient for the world they create to live on its own, to endure and renew itself. I believe that the fiction in which we live suffers from the reduction of distances caused by globalization and the abusive implantation of digital sensors in reality and in our lives. The elsewhere, the strange, the otherwise, are things that have become rare and that nations are increasingly protecting themselves from. Art is there to enable us to cross over and to foster a more elastic relationship with the other.
U: How does art help you to understand the layers and meaning of life?
L: Artistic practice enables me to grasp the multiplicity of worlds and their representations. I'm sensitive to a polyphonic approach to meaning: hearing different voices across space and time. Art can provide the imagination needed to break away from a one-size-fits-all narrative and suggest more hopeful futures than the ones rehashed every day in the media.
I believe that the work of memory has a key role to play in turning things around. We should perhaps consider the human adventure and its history in the same way as this continent of waste that can no longer be hidden.
Toutes les images/All images:© Courtesy de l'artiste et TEMPLON, Paris—Brussels—NewYork
U: What is the most critical question that creating art gets you to ask and go about finding the answer to those questions?
L: Of course, there is a duty of truth in art, as Cézanne famously put it. But I feel closer to Beckett's when he was asked why he wrote: "Bon qu'à ça" I wonder how to preserve humility in relation to what the work is advancing (considering the thousands of artistic adventures that have ventured there) and, at the same time know how to persist, how to sign on, in a form of joy and salvific excess. This is the difficulty of being both tyrannical and democratic.
U: You trained in painting and drawing at the Beaux-Arts de Paris and then at Le Fresnoy. How did that education help you further your artistic statement and expression in the works created during your time there and after?
L: At the Beaux-Arts de Paris, there is still a very old studio system, with a studio head and the anchoring of a chosen discipline. I was enrolled in a painting studio, but I pushed open many doors at the school. During those five years, I suffered from not being as committed as some of my classmates to a distinct practice before realizing that this was perhaps my strength and that I shouldn't worry about the very rough aspect of the work I was making at the time.
On the contrary, the experience at Le Fresnoy was decisive. During my final year of study, I created this large-scale animated multimedia sculpture based on the writings of James Joyce. It's a work that, for me, is both a landmark, an act of birth, and one that has prophetic value. I'm far from having resolved many of the questions it raised. It continues to inspire me and to be the driving force behind my desire.
U: What other themes would you like to explore that you have yet to see through art?
L: I'd like to move away from an overly respectful relationship with art history and find a more organic and collective relationship with the past. I think that might mean abandoning a certain form of good taste without losing the exacting standards and the sacred - almost aristocratic - dimension of art. The image of Carnival seems to me to be the best suited to what attracts me at the moment: there are beggar kings and crowned fools in a motley crowd.
Toutes les images/All images:© Courtesy de l'artiste et TEMPLON, Paris—Brussels—NewYork
U: Where did the inspiration come from for your last exhibit with Templon Gallery?
L: I wanted to follow up on the final scene in Michelangelo Antonioni's film Zabriskie Point (1970). Daria, one of the two main characters, shatters a luxurious villa. The objects are suspended in space in slow motion for around ten minutes to the music of Pink Floyd.
I wondered what the missing image of the film would be: the objects falling back down. And what does this have to do with us, those of us who inherit the ideas and utopias of the 70s?
Inheritance is a poisoned gift. Painting objects have become inseparable from their becoming waste. However, I have tried to preserve this explosive, airy joy in my paintings. Bodies dance and struggle, which means the same thing.
U: Are there any painting techniques you are currently exploring? Or other techniques through other artistic mediums? Do you have a preference?
L: I have started a new series of paintings inspired by this question of destruction and the levelling out that it implies. I have entitled this series Natural Histories, echoing the text by the writer G.W. Sebald, On Destruction as Part of Natural History (2004).
The paintings combine representations of waste objects with reproductions of old and contemporary paintings. The frontal viewpoint is ambiguous: it could be as much a scanned image as a view of the sky. It seems to me that averting our gaze from the question of waste resonates with what we seek, in our history, to bury or what we are unable to see in the face.
With regard to my technical desires, I'd like to continue developing my drawings in the form of fabric sculptures.
Toutes les images/All images:© Courtesy de l'artiste et TEMPLON, Paris—Brussels—NewYork
U: How has using 3D and 2D in sculpting helped you use and find new angles as a video maker?
L: The transition from drawing to volume allowed me to explore the real space outside the studio.
In Rome, I printed drawings on large sheets of polyurethane which I bent and assembled to construct a volume drawing like a kind of origami. It’s the same principle as a sewing pattern.
I am fascinated by this passage from one dimension to another. I believe that this is what the Cubists sought to do in their time: explore the blind spots of the painting and make them coexist with the visible facets. The idea of being able to go around a painted figure from a single point of view gives me a breath of immense freedom. It is once again escaping a state of affairs and unfolding space-time. This is why I made a three-screen film based on the paintings of Paolo Uccello. Replaying the triptych brought the video into the field of sculpture. And the drawing leaves the workshop.
U: Can you tell the canvas or surface's role in your painting process?
L: For a long time, I kept the cotton canvas raw so that the things represented would stand out as clearly as a sheet of paper pinned to a wall. Then I turned to coloured backgrounds, which have the same function. The canvas becomes a receptive surface like a mental map, an editing table, an unswept floor, a beach after a shipwreck. The frame chosen is a snapshot. It could have been something else, but it stopped there, as in the cinema.
I want us to guess at the infinity of the off-screen that persists and the next canvas that will redistribute the whole. Godard says about the sky in cinema: "frame," not "frame."
For more information about Léonard ‘s artwork, please visit his Instagram, and for information about his recent exhibition, Suite Zabriskie, with the Templon Gallery, visit their website, visit the magazine’s showcase here.
