AYTHAMY ARMAS, LAURENT MARTIN LO

The line is their common thread. It underpins drawing, traces writing, opens form. But for Laurent Martin “Lo” and Aythamy Armas, the line transcends this initial role to become an endpoint: a fracture that reveals the depth of space and the texture of the void. From there, both artists embark on an exploration of balance—of forms, of tensions, of voids—where the harmony of composition takes shape. By treating emptiness as an active presence, they transform space into a tangible material.

Trained in decorative arts in Paris and a former creative director, Laurent Martin “Lo” left everything behind to follow an intuition: bamboo. Discovered during a journey through Asia, this material became an obsession. For over fifteen years, “Lo” has traveled through India, Indonesia, Costa Rica, and Vietnam in search of its properties, its uses, its wisdom. Out of these journeys has grown a rare body of work, rooted in direct experience with the living plant, in artisanal gesture, and in deep listening to the material itself. Suspended in space, his sculptures trace weightless lines. Each tension, each counterweight, each curve is conceived as a point of equilibrium. Out of this fragility unfolds a visual poetry of oscillations and silences. In dialogue with air, light, and shadow, bamboo comes to embody the very essence of movement.

For Aythamy Armas, this reflection on movement is transposed into pictorial matter. His canvases emerge from a slow, interior process in which composition takes on a rhythmic, almost musical structure. Armas treats the canvas as a three-dimensional space: the thickness of a line, the intensity of a mark, all conjure the illusion of a surface that is anything but flat. The void is never singular—it too becomes an essential actor, a place of passage and circulation. For this Tête à Tête, Armas let himself be permeated by the world of Laurent Martin “Lo”—not to echo it formally, but to bring out its resonance. Line, rhythm, gesture, and that shared sense of suspension have become his guides. His paintings unfold as a passage between abstraction and materiality.

Within the gallery, the works do not simply mirror one another. They coexist—each affirming its own language—while opening a space of encounter where opposites find harmony: black and white, strength and suppleness, fullness and void. Between sculpture and painting emerges a clear dialogue: a shared exploration of balance, reaching its fullest expression in this encounter.