Marguerite Pilven

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The exhibition unites selected drawings and sculptures over the whole of Olivier Leroi’s path. This choice puts forward two underlying aspects: an importance given to the gesture, as well as a refined perception of reality beyond its appearance.

Olivier Leroi draws on found and chosen pieces of paper. Evidence from their past provoques meaning. The drawings hold bearing in a specific moment by crystallising it, and are the manifestation of a conscience, the precipitation of an experiment. Their sobriety, linked to a fixation on the detail, raises the question of its origins in the sense of an act. These allegories built upon changes of scale associate the factual observation with the expectations we hope for. The most intimate questions the most universal, the infinitesimal and the infinite dialogue in a nutshell.

When he draws from printed images, Leroi cuts them out in order to give them new outlines. Thus, their material becomes substance. It migrates towards a possible sense that has been detected in the mass of its information. Often present in recent works, the figure of Pinocchio symbolises the transformation from matter into energy.

By playing with the correspondance between visible and invisible, the artist hustles the neutrality of the perception that he links to self awareness. The elements he assembles in his collages often have a metonymic function. Through their natural diversity, Olivier Leroi calls upon a plurality of worlds; he provoques their unexpected convergence through equations that the other has to solve.

The artist’s socratic irony defeats certainty and surprises. It depends upon an economy of circumstances that defines the vitality of the work. It is this time of the first look, one of renewed astonishment, that he wants us to notice and of which he offers the generation.

Press release of a curatoring projet for Drawing Now, galerie laurent mueller, Paris