After "Asphyxie," four years ago, I am presenting my second solo exhibition at the Les Filles du Calvaire gallery in their new space: "Impotence", in search of an aesthetic adapted to the time of climate drift, decentered from anthropocentrism, and sensitive to the tragic loss of what is still there.
As part of the end of the banal¹, it will be an exhibition with fragmented and torn themes, with a title serving as a fragrance. This title still, symptomatically, refers to a sexual issue today, while here it will be about political and existential impotence, as well as painting through limited experiences. Also, a desired impotence: less power in devastation, in appropriation, in control, more care, more tenderness, more humble attention, and dignity to the daily treasure that is the world of appearances.
You will find German virilist police officers bogged down in the mud, a sunset over the sea contemplated by a plastic bin, the ultra-urbanized beach of Ostend made obsolete by rising waters, a front wall of bricks covered with love tags as public traces of a narrow existence².
"In the Greenhouse," a painting that took me two years to develop, depicts a crowd queuing in an artificial garden. In the midst of human counter-productivity and disharmony of the biotope, the pictorial treatment of the swarming plants is as precise as that of humans.
The multitude of subjects and the variety of execution speeds also allow for a deployment of texture: skin, fur, slimy, viscous, sticky; it is not about abandoning the joy of painting. This is evident in a bestiary like a cow's buttocks, a ladybug, a rooster, a self-portrait, or a dozing cat.
The exhibition will also feature small formats at the scale of saxicolous plants, this nameless greenery, a treasure of vitality that valiantly grows in the mineral interstices of our cities and refreshes them. Taking the form of an invented technique: engravings pulled from digital drawings on iPad, allowing an unprecedented finesse of line.
Additionally, my series of "Distanciels" will be featured: charcoal portraits executed via Zoom during the pandemic, faces backlit by their computer screen in the ambiance and connection quality of their confinement.
In the basement, an anxiety-inducing conceptual video, "You Are Here," will contaminate the entire exhibition. A frontal reflection on our present way of life, the violence, and poison it requires.
Finally, in the attitude that has been mine for three years, every Saturday of the exhibition at 5 pm, I will host a public episode of "Apparences," a YouTube and Twitch channel about the vitality of contemporary painting on the French scene³.
— Thomas Lévy-Lasne
¹ Title of my first monograph to be released in September by Éditions des Beaux-Arts de Paris (280 pages).
² You can find a 30-minute lecture on this single painting at MO.CO. Montpellier.
