October 14, 2022 — January 5, 2023
Artist : François Réau
Curator: Léo Marin
Drawings in the sky that continue to situate our own bodies, our individualities, between two fictitious points, between two planes, the first: terrestrial, and the second: celestial.
Series of points like these which are connected by lines, let us project ourselves into the future and imagine more intricate drawings or paths to follow. That is the starting point of Du Temps sois la mesure (“Of Time be the Measure”). A handful of strokes and dots whose intention extends beyond what we can see: a more extensive pictorial projection, a measure of space and time.
It is from this reflection that the exhibition project with François Réau for the Drawing Lab was born. A project that takes its name from one of the verses of antoine Léonard Thomas' famous poem first published in 1762.
Urania's compass measured space. O Time, to be unknown that the soul alone embraces.
It all starts like this, with the muse dedicated to the study of the celestial vault and his favorite tool. This famous compass that measures between two stars the space and time that separate them from each other before, to include them in a larger drawing, a constellation.
It is also in this way that François Réau decided to work who will deploy all his drawing practice for this project, while seeking to push the limits of this medium both in its process and in its support. From the pencil stroke to the light line through the drawing in installation.
The visitor will then have the opportunity to browse different appreciations of a drawing that escapes from its primary support and invades the exhibition space. He will thus be allowed to confront a space-time of visual thought where the artist's practice merges into a time of visual thought where poetry and history mingle.
Leo Marin
Curator
#DuTempssoislamesure
@drawinglabparis
François Réau, Mesurer le temps (detail), 2022.
Lead pencil, graphite, and watercolor on paper, mounted on canvas, 240 x 375 cm. © François Réau.
Appointment
Opening of the exhibition Ser uma mistura, um desenho, um desejo (Being a mixture, a drawing, a desire)
Drawing Academy Workshops
Every Wednesday and Saturday 22, 29 October and 5 November 2022, the Drawing Lab offers your children (from 6 years old) a tour of the exhibition with our mediator followed by a creative workshop using the artist's technique.
Book a workshop for your child now by e-mail by clicking here!
Head in the stars
Sky mapping workshop
François Réau's exhibition is directly inspired by the sky and space. The stars joined together form drawings that are then called constellations. Like little astronomers, discover the stars and the multitude of drawings they form at night above our heads. But what do the stars do during the day? Using fluorescent tubes and paint create your own map of the daytime sky when the stars are at rest!
All Stars
Drawing workshop in space
The star is a luminous star in space, but it can also refer to a dancer of the Opera. The Drawing Lab invites you on a space expedition that combines dance, drawing and light. If it is with the help of fluorescent neon that the artist François Réau connects two stars and draws in the exhibition with light, it is with the help of a photographic process and flashlights that the astronauts will have to connect the stars together in the exhibition. Thus drawings in space, like traces of the movements of a dance without weightlessness, will be revealed. But what do we draw with the body? What constellations form stars when they dance in the sky?
The artist/curator duo
François Réau
François Réau is a French artist, born in 1978. François Réau lives and works in Paris.
A multidisciplinary artist, his work raises the principle of the appearance and disappearance of figures and motifs, at the very heart of materials. His work articulates drawing and installation, mental landscape and physical landscape, the immensely large or the unspeakable in plastic devices that question the links between man and nature. We find the themes of temporality or human fragility. His work pushes the limits of drawing so that it escapes its support and gains space. It then gives it the possibility of being a space and a time of experience and visual thinking. Many of his works weave links between dream and reality; through nature, the landscape can thus become the instrument of a poetic metaphor or the refuge of a plastic feeling that will offer the eye the opportunity of re-enchantment.
He attended the Regional School of Fine Arts in Poitiers, then the School of Applied Arts (EAA Poitiers). His work has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions in France and abroad, including Lille3000, Mons 2015 – European Capital of Culture, as well as at the Guoyi Art Museum in Beijing, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris and the Musée de l'Hospice Saint-Roch in Issoudun in the Indre – which will host two of his works in his collections.
The artist is a finalist of the "Contemporary Talents" prize of the François Schneider Foundation in Wattwiller in 2015 and 2016. In the spring of 2020, one of his large drawings is presented at the Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen on the occasion of an international exhibition.
A whole part of his immersive drawing work is also exhibited in several places, including the Domaine de Chaumont sur Loire, the Musée Jenisch in Vevey in Switzerland, the Domaine de Kerguéhennec in Morbihan and the Drawing Lab in Paris. Finally, the Royal Abbey of Fontevraud invites him this year to design a perennial work. She commissioned him to create the decoration of a bell, the small 1.6-ton bumblebee, which will integrate the gardens of the abbey in the summer of 2021.
Leo Marin
Since 2014, Léo Marin has also directed the contemporary section of the Galerie Éric Mouchet in Paris — Saint-Germain-des-Prés. In charge of the young creation program, he is a team of French and international artists.
Cartography and topography in contemporary artistic practice and the relationship of artists to insularity are his favorite research topics.
Holder of a master's degree in Art History and Contemporary Art and Sociology, he is an active member of the Associés Exhibition Curators (C-E-A) and a member of the A.I.C.A. France since 2018 and defends a non-elitist art criticism accessible to all.
Publisher and art critic, he is one of the co-founders of Éditions Born And Die with Aurélie Faure and Ivan Dapic.
In 2017, he launched the "Mapping At Last" project, followed by the second part "The Plausible Island" in 2019. In this context, he collaborates with many galleries, various public partners and institutions. The creation of The Plausible Island residence in Vulcano in the Aeolian Islands, Sicily, was born from this continuity.
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