carlier | gebauer is pleased to present Still wave, a solo exhibition by Guillaume Leblon.

Guillaume Leblon’s work is filled with references evoking nature, the domestic environment or the artist studio.

In Still wave, Leblon presents four large scale paintings of the sea. Based on black and white photographs of the sea side in Normandy, the works depict a wave on a still and calm sea. For Leblon, this only one wave formation on smooth water, which appeared in front of him, was a gift and in his own words a “temporal suspension”. The intention of the artist was not to imitate the true colors of the landscape photographed this day but to use “artificial” palettes. The chosen tones green, grey, pink and blue differ in each painting and leave us to wonder on how real the scenery is — the same question the artist asked himself the day he captured the wave.

In the artist’s own words: “My work is made during my movements and travels and not really in the studio, which I regard as a receptacle where the sum of all the things I collect is to be found” And these “movements” seem to be translated into the exhibition space, as I want to offer the audience a certain point of view to look at the work in order to create a sense of strolling in the exhibition space. The exhibition becomes a landscape, a routing, without starting or end point”.

Guillaume Leblon’s work resists simplifying discourses as much as the enclosure of forms, developing a new sculptural landscape that favours a poetic connection to space and the world — promoting an active, mobile and open relationship. With a nuanced and intuitive vocabulary, his sculptures modify our perception of both the atmospheric and memorial dimensions of time and space by highlighting the physical potentialities of forms and materials.

Guillaume Leblon (b.1971, Lille) lives and works in New York. Upcoming solo exhibitions include SMAK, Ghent in March 2018. He will take part of the Cleveland Triennal, FRONT international in July 2018. Selected solo exhibitions include CAG, Vancouver; MassMoCA, North Adams; IAC - Institut d’Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne; Fondation d’entreprise Ricard, Paris; MUDAM, Luxembourg; Culturgest, Porto; and Kunstverein Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf. Leblon has participated in group exhibitions at venues such as La Verrière Hermès, Brussels; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; Biennale de Lyon, Lyon; Secession, Vienna; Bétonsalon, Paris; Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, St. Gallen; MARTa Herford, Herford; Fridericianum, Kassel; and CAC Vilnius, Vilnius.