
Perrotin Paris is pleased to introduce_Focus_, a new initiative dedicated to special projects and thematic presentations. Located in our gallery at 2bis avenue Matignon,Focus offers an intimate setting for artists to explore short, experimental, or deeply personal narratives. Audiences can engage with curated projects that highlight a unique aspect of an artist’s practice beyond larger exhibitions.
The inaugural_Focus_ exhibition is a poetic series by Lionel Estève entitled _Un Hiver à Athènes _(A Winter in Athens). Using delicate embroidery on pieces of white silk, the artist documents his wanderings through Athens, capturing fleeting impressions of the city’s landscapes, textures, and rhythms.
Hazard or chance? Definitely something uncertain and random. It took a series of fortuitous events and a little hope to get here. We’re not talking about major events. As so often, it’s about converging clusters of ideas and desires.
I had a large scrap of natural silk organza left over at the studio from a previous project. Its lightness, suppleness, and transparency were attractive, and I hoped it might become the beginning of something. It was an intuition, like so many others while you’re working. So I asked Hossein, my tailor neighbor, to make some kind of prototype, like a silk scarf.
Lionel Estève experiments with various materials and handcrafted techniques to create refined objects including–but not limited to–collages, assemblages, sculptures and mobiles. His unclassifiable mix-media aesthetics unapologetically eludes the current rhetoric of contemporary art to evoke instead a sheer sense of beauty. Whether figurative or abstract, his delicate visions are generally inspired after motifs found in the natural world or its sensual experience, which is the primary source of his unbridled creativity. Like a limner illuminating manuscripts, he seeks to go beyond the mere surface of things and transcend their wonders through gleeful artifice. When he doesn’t directly adorn real elements such as plants and stones, sometimes all that remains in his sculptural yet almost diaphanous oeuvre is the mesmerising feel of shimmering light or fractal patterns blossoming. Further interested in the notion of multiverse, Lionel Estève exposes different ideas of nature to explore the possibility of parallel worlds.

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