Léonard Martin
Rêver debout – MUba Tourcoing
The Musée des Beaux-Arts in Tourcoing is devoting a solo show to Léonard Martin, curated by Mélanie Lerat and Bénédicte Duvernay.
From September 20, 2024 to February 24, 2025
“Rêver debout” is a new exhibition conceived jointly by MUba Eugène Leroy and Le Fresnoy – Studio national des arts contemporains, an international school dedicated to film and audiovisual art founded in 1997 in the same city.
Gregor Božič and Léonard Martin, graduates of Le Fresnoy in 2021 and 2017 respectively, meet the museum’s collections in two spaces devoted respectively to landscape and the body, where the works have been chosen with the artists so as to reveal obvious or more subterranean links with their work.
Gregor Božič photographs and films places in Europe where, thanks to the dreams of a handful of farmers, fruit-growing is still escaping industrialization. Léonard Martin’s background is in painting and drawing, and he uses film, assemblage and language to cobble together a new mobility for the bodies represented. Both are aware of working with art history in the present, and draw from this awareness a formal requirement.
“Rêver debout” means working with the chaos of the world, of course, but also recomposing it in the other space of the work of art. It’s about unfolding narratives and fables through images, in an attempt to build or rebuild a world.
Curated by Mélanie Lerat and Bénédicte Duvernay, director and deputy director of MUba Eugène Leroy, accompanied by Pascale Pronnier, head of artistic programming at Le Fresnoy, with the invaluable support of the two artists.
Danse Zabriskie V, 2023
The artist
Born in 1991 in Paris, Léonard Martin currently lives and works in the French capital. The French art scene has been captivated by his work since he graduated from Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2015. In 2018-2019, he was artist-in-residence at the French Academy in Rome at the Villa Medici. His creative process makes use of drawings, papers and precious sculptures he occasionally animates with stop motion, a motor or video. He finds his subjects by delving into literature and the history of art. Wooden figures on tracks bring to life the characters of Irish novelist and poet James Joyce on their strolls. Italian painter Paolo Uccello’s horse riders serve as a pretext to create an interactive piece. He sometimes takes a break from building marionettes and automatons and uses painting to capture the theatre of objects that is his workshop. Visibly playing with perspective and cultural labels, particularly “painting” and “sculptures”, the scenes he creates generate a dialogue between mediums and eras.
