- For Laurent Chabot, light is a physical phenomenon, a transport of energy without transport of matter, like the movement of a visible dream of which the sun is the vehicle. Visual artist, poet and photographer, Laurent Chabot likes to capture this phenomenon through the only color that is valuable to him. “I started to paint in yellow in 1983, the year I arrived in Paris. In summer, from my apartment, I could see the district of La Défense in the distance, leaded in a veiled light, the same as that of the end of the field of my adolescence, a touch of yellowish pollution in addition. This is what led me to think of light, pure and impure, light at its zenith… ”. Since then, the themes have followed one another with the sun as a focal point or as a privileged observer, like an emperor or a pope on their balcony, a silversmith willing to fashion any piece of his choice. New York, the Atacama Desert in Chile, the landscapes of the French countryside before the harvest, the landscapes of the French countryside after the harvest and the millstones, everywhere, like new rotundities around which a complicit, serene and modest nature is ready to our admiration. Applied with care, several coats of transparent paint increase the effect of depth of the pattern and color (this is the glaze technique of the classical masters). The formats are generous, like the painter, moreover, whose work shows an almost filial respect for nature in general, the countryside in particular, the place of his origins, the matrix of his talent. “The question is to understand where the line of graphic work lies. Before applying the yellow? After? Enticing magic !. Is it dawn? Is it twilight? The present past? The future ? As Sylvie Reymond-Lépine (Curator at La Ville de Paris) asks. Wake up or go to bed, it doesn't really matter, since Laurent Chabot invites us to the wedding. So, then, we can say that Van Gogh would gladly have walked in these paintings haloed in their yellow oil or that Rothko would like to meet such an artist. And, saying so, we wouldn't be so far from the truth. Jean-Pierre Delest - Roland Deleu is an architect and artist. Born in Belgium, he lives and works in Paris. If shapes, spaces and volumes hold no secrets for him, painting, drawing and sculpture are just as innate in his life as an artist. Having grown up in an environment of builders and artists, his career seems quite naturally as an extension of his childhood. He studied at the Arts Déco in Paris and began directly this parallel life of architect - artist by presenting his first architectural projects in Paris and New York while inaugurating his first exhibitions of drawings and sculptures. “Few boundaries between these disciplines,” he says, “the same sincerity, the same taste for authenticity and the ambition to be timeless. »His works vary between abstraction and figurative, combining poetry, emotion, humor. Today, his new approach presented here, “Art” architecture, illustrates the symbiosis of his two major concerns: architecture and sculpture. In the same constructive logic as for his large works produced by assembling wooden trays, he works here in small formats with thinner sheets, marrying "characters" with simulacra of imaginary architecture.
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