Catapult : Louis Gary

Titled Catapult, the exhibition brings together a selection from the artist’s playful bas-reliefs.

“In his bas-reliefs, Louis Gary sculpts shapes made of styrofoam and plaster that take on colors in the manner of coloring pictures and whose gestures and techniques are those of house painters, facade designers or film decorators. The layers of lacquer cover and connect the forms, smoothing and coating them. These bas-reliefs are for Louis Gary paintings relieved from the relationship to Painting, as if the forms had ended up absorbing the window to preserve only the objects: « it is rather these things that come to see us and that are there ». We encounter portraits in all smiles, close-ups, lynxes in tears and situations where the scales grow larger or smaller adhering to a distance from things. The imaginary world present on the bulging surface of these paintings is very close to us, filled with doubt and tender awkwardness, flirtation and laughter whose order of distribution seems cut off from all logic. Everything or almost everything characterizes the image of a moment of embarrassment or a carefully modeled foolishness giving way to a kind of storyboard of which we would not have all the frames. In this equivocation, the concrete side remains mysterious, the associations of the mind are confusing, yet with a very familiar resemblance retrieved from the ordinary.“

Louis Gary’s playful approach to art is grounded in a daring and impeccable workmanship. Working across sculpture, painting and photography, he creates a consciousness-altering universe where embossed sculptures are arranged in unfamiliar syntax, their narrative intertwined with a clumsy psychoanalysis that links together the grotesque, poetry and black humor. The precision and the straightforward attitude in his use of colour positions the latter as the main ingredient of sculptural form. He uses his photographic practice to recreate the sensitive background of his work, anchoring it in a history of forms that plays its own ambiguities without irony. 

As an exploration of the relationship between furniture and sculpture, between the use value of decorative objects and their animistic presence and potentials, Louis Gary’s work is a humorous celebration of contemplation, the supernatural and the carnival, offering a lookout into a new consideration of the world, gestures and things. 

Born in 1982, Louis Gary studied at the Ecole Régionale des Beaux-Arts in Nantes, at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in Arles and at the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Marseille. He currently lives and works in Burgundy. His recent solo exhibitions include Et le coeur devient un flacon de parfum, Le Poctb, Orléans, 2021; You Wanted it Darker, Glassbox, Paris, 2020; Magic Saliva, Semiose Galerie, 2019; Mathilde et Mylène ; L’Ahah, Paris, 2019. His work has been included in group shows at THE PILL® Istanbul (2022); Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard, Paris (2018); Le Confort Moderne, Poitiers (2018); Glassbox, Paris (2016); Moly Sabata, Sablons (2014) among others. He has so far published two artist books: Bonjour Alan (Zool Editions, 2021) and Ici (September Books, 2020).