Design: This month we look at a remarkable coming together of two major talents – Serge Leblon and Lionel Jadot.
Season XV – Les ignorants – Serge Leblon & Lionel Jadot: Two different practices, photography and design, and yet the same common thread: an obsession with the organic and instinctive relationship with raw materials, the same one that fed their artistic approach and brought them together to collaborate for this exhibition project at Spazio Nobile. They did not want a simple juxtaposition of their personal work. Lionel and Serge have aimed to achieve an original creation, which would combine their respective practices, around a common theme. The subject has imposed itself on themselves: the modification of the body by the addition of machines, of various objects constraining and at the same time increasing humane energy. Low-tech objects or scrap that give birth to ephemeral human architectures.
It is their DIY, poetically imperfect version of a sort of transhumanism, where the philosophy of the Arte Povera* woven into the objects and machines of Lionel Jadot, between recycling and overcycling, will be grafted on individuals from everyday life. These will then be put into images and filmed by Serge Leblon in a universe inspired by Dogma 95, a filmmaking movement started in 1995 and eponym manifesto created by the Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg.
The result of this combination of the augmented individuals of Lionel and the images of Serge is resolutely poetic and laced with satirical criticism. They want to provoke a humour that is reminiscent of the images of Buster Keaton. We are formally approaching the ready-made, transgressive upcycling, Frankenstein, the film Crash by Cronenberg, the film One Week by Buster Keaton, a combination of influences that are part of their common imagination.
* Arte Povera (poor art) was a contemporary art movement, which took place between the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s in major cities throughout Italy and above all in Turin.
Spazio Nobile Gallery, Brussels 4 September – 8 November www.spazionobile.com
