VERTIGO : Gabriel Leger
How could anyone hide from that which never sets?
As if to answer Heraclitus’s sibylline question, Gabriel Leger deploys even vaster enigmas. He makes mirrors reflect. He hollows out the eternity of faces. He makes time flow alongside celestial bodies. He seizes boiling nebulae. He holds vertigo in suspension. He petrifies space. He makes the unfathomable speak. He unveils ancestral secrets by creating new ones. He brings life to the depths of matter and being. But first, he steals from the sun its fervor...
Yes! With the meticulousness of a child captivated by a fascinating object, the artist bends over the corrosive power of the fireball. When you are the sun, to burn is to sign. Period. And indeed, when it is not merely rivaling the moon, the sun is intoxicating, obsessive: it has witnessed the birth and demise of so much beauty, the explosion of so many lives in silent crashes… It is as an eternal witness that Gabriel Leger asks the sun for a small signature, just above ancient ruins, as if to say: “I saw. I am not so blinded by my own light.” And by patiently recording its heat, it is the skin of the world that the artist reveals to us.
Yet Gabriel Leger does not only dialogue with the daytime star; he also weaves links with the infinite in its spatial, temporal, and ontological forms. Whether it be the cosmos, eternity, or the essence of the human being, the abyss is open. And vertigo is guaranteed—raw, unsparing. Gabriel Leger seeks this vertigo, provokes it, and, once found, never lets it go: he plants his sharp gaze into endless spaces, he plays with the nerves of impermanence, he plunges into the crypt of time.
By marrying photographs of the starry sky in Vichy France with vernacular snapshots taken at the exact same moment, the artist points out a kinship ("Kinship") that is fabulous, to say the least: we are made of stardust! What if, rather than the Earth, our true cradle were the Milky Way? Thus, reconnecting with the wild yet static dance of the stars allows us to rise above the ravages of the present. This very present which, caught up in the bloody commerce of men, possesses neither the aura nor the allure of the ruins and stars so dear to the artist.
It is undoubtedly because he cherishes the unfathomable that, the better to preserve it, Gabriel Leger creates epiphanies. In Les miroirs incessants (The Incessant Mirrors), two mirrors silvered by the artist in the dark (having therefore never reflected anyone) and sealed to one another, are condemned to face each other forever and remain silent for eternity. The idea is as beautiful as it is chilling: if even mirrors cannot escape their own simulacra, how could we? It is this same abyssal question that is raised with the artwork The Face I Had. By placing a piece of obsidian or agate where a face of flesh would stand, turned toward the adversary, the artist creates an anti-mask: he strips bare the depths of being.
The Vertigo exhibition is a poetic quest through the inner self and the intimacy of the world, a wandering between macro and micro-history. With the wonder of a child and the skill of a sage, the artist opens up compromises and passageways. It is up to us to rush into them, but it will take audacity—for the chasm he points out to us... has been our own since the dawn of time. Gabriel Leger's work is like a crypt, a labyrinth in which, far from getting lost, it is possible to find something larger and more precious than oneself. The world, perhaps? Unless it is eternity…
Clarisse Gorokhoff
