BRUSSELS.- Albert Baronian and Renos Xippas announced that the gallery is holding the sixth solo exhibition of works by Lionel Estève called “Une histoire simple”.
The characteristic that particularly defines Lionel Estève is his capacity to combine informality and fragility to create the effectiveness of a work that guides the eye of the beholder more than actually revealing something to them. It arouses the perception of an infinite reality by revealing a space that is palpable and almost tactile.
He has spent the last thirty years discovering different materials and manual techniques such as working with glass, frescoes, ceramics, watercolour, collages, and sculpture in all its forms. He also explores a wide range of non-academic techniques that he himself has more or less invented in order to create assemblages, sculptures, mobiles and installations. His unclassifiable ‘mixed-media’ approach eludes the current rhetoric in the world of contemporary art and he prefers to evoke a feeling of absolute beauty. Whether figuratively or abstractly, his delicate visions are generally inspired by patterns that he finds in the organic world of nature and his own sensual experiences - the initial sources of this unbridled creativity. Like an illuminator working on a manuscript, Lionel works at reaching beyond the simple surface of things thanks to a sense of wonder that the presence of his works provokes with their joyous artifices. Fascinated by the notion of multiple universes like different historic strata, Lionel Estève exhibits different notions about nature in order to explore the parallel universes that exist therein.
“I wanted to do something simple, like tell a story and for the story to be accessible to everyone. In order to tell a story with images, the images themselves should not be too enigmatic, so that they are comprehensible and so that they seem to follow on from one another rather like the sequences of silent films. This exhibition is made up of a series of 21 drawings. They are drawings that I have made as well as I could by twisting, welding, painting metallic threads. They are the drawings of a sculptor. Even though each drawing is autonomous, they form a kind of series, in an order so that the narrative can run its course, so that there is an imagined protagonist and so that there is magic afoot. Like all stories, this one is a moment to lull the well-behaved children that we have become.” --- Lionel Estève
Lionel Estève was born in Lyon in 1967 and has lived and worked in Brussels for more than 20 years. He started participating in a wide range of exhibitions in 1997. These include shows such as the “Jardins” in 2017 at the Grand Palais in Paris, “Là où commence le jour” at the LaM in Lille, “Heavy Lines” in 2012 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessalonica, “Involution” in 2005 at the CAC in Brétigny, “Amicalement vôtre” in 2004 at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Tourcoing, “Migrateur” in 2003 at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris organised by Hans-Ulrich Obrist.
