Léonard Martin

Echappée guère / (Portrait de Dédale en fichènchip) - Installation - 2017

présentée dans le cadre de l'exposition panorama 19

Installation


Six seems to be the ideal number by which to invite the spectators – or sixtators – to combine their twelve vigilant eyes on the twists and turns of a labyrinth.
Three circuits for twelve; being four eyes per circuit, enough to stupefy Google Glass or this fearsome camera with nine eyes that strikes and watches, omniscient, right to the edges of the last sacred forests. Because there where the undertaking of the deforestation of imagination each day takes over more ground, Daedalus makes luxuriant flowering paths grow, where the last look-outs, high up in their crow’s nest, point out the reef or the drifting raft.
There is a spectre-tator, a (s)talker who draws our footsteps to his. He has the nicknames of Jim, Giacomo, Jiji l’Amoroso or J.J., also known as James Joyce. His path is full of obstacles. He is not easy to follow: traps and brawls. Certain people still dare to go out into the streets of Dublin, where his spirit continues to strike. Daedalus has constructed his business so well that it seems impossible to escape it without burning his wings. No vanishing point, no perspective, for he who, so it’s said, takes the step across allowing statuary to come alive. But the railings, like those who hold them, may be a sheet of paper, Joyce of madness. The ramparts hide the bastard child, the hybrid, the monstrous, like our conscience, which summons up its courage so as to not give way beneath the intrigues of the depths.
The thread that unwinds here tries to become a pointsman, the station chief, or the chief of considerations, of those who have barely escaped it. Only foundations, breaks, frameworks find themselves on the margin, on the verge; those who conjure up the vanishing point, who migrate, who deport, who transport themselves. Hardly less, Icarus and Minotaur simultaneously. For these desiring bodies, Daedalus invented the ship, vessel and crockery all at once, hence in a collapse of words hatred, chips, ship and cheap land. This fishinship is a haddock brainwave which intends to abandon itself to its transport; a ship whose sail is blown out by the thousands of voices of languages not yet signposted with arrows. Stephen will be the hero who will sing all the dissonances. There will always be enough mermaids captured to silence the hum of the world.

Léonard Martin


Lives and works in Paris and Lille. He graduated with a distinction from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris where he trained in François Boisrond's studio. He participated in the 61st Salon de Montrouge. His first encounter with film was motivated by his desire to see the animation of painted forms. Not that these figures were unfamiliar with movement, the history of painting has constantly set the body in movement, but rather that these figures were waiting for a scheme, a device that would resuscitate them, for a mechanism to disrupt time. Image by image, cinema as the site of anima would appear to be ideal for such metamorphosis to take place.
In more recent works, Léonard has used string puppets with a view to extending the very first moments of awakening, of birth, and the indeterminate and incipient aspects of movement.

Production


Le Fresnoy - Studio national des arts contemporains, Tourcoing