Portrait of the artist Léonard Martin

Léonard Martin was born in 1991 in Paris. He was trained in painting and drawing at the Beaux-Arts de Paris and then at Le Fresnoy. Inspired by James Joyce’s Ulysses, his 2nd year project was awarded the ADAGP Digital and Video Art Revelation Prize in 2017 and shown at La Villette in April 2018. A former resident at Villa Medicis in Rome, he was also selected for the Emerige Revelation Scholarship, which earned him an exhibition at Villa Emerige in 2018. The same year, he was awarded the Audi Talents 2018 prize. His work has also been exhibited at the Salon de Montrouge à Jeune création, as well as at the Collection Lambert in Avignon.

His approach

Her work explores the different modes of representation of movement through a dialogue between painting, animation cinema, puppet film and mechanical sculpture. The search for a physical language based on signs and no longer words led him to work with authors such as James Joyce, William Faulkner or Arno Schmidt. The desire to see the painted forms come alive provoked his encounter with cinema. Not that these figures would ignore movement, the history of painting has not stopped putting the body in motion, but rather that they would be waiting for a relay, a support that would revive them, a machine to disrupt time.

Biennial Project of Contemporary Art 2019

For the Biennale, Léonard Martin proposes a playful dialogue between references to art history and popular means of expression. He orchestrated a sculptural encounter between Paolo Uccello’s Italian Renaissance (influence Battle of San Romano), puppet theatre and Carnival games, through inflatable sculptures that he designed for the occasion.

Find the work of Leonard Martin from September 18, 2019 to January 5, 2020. More informations.