LEFFLER Lucas, Photography, invited artist, La fabrique des éléments

At the crossroads of genres, Lucas Leffler's work invokes the documentary, the experimental and flirts with fiction. The artist willingly assumes the position of investigator, both to research the technical aspects of photography, testifying to an inextinguishable taste for experimentation, and to trace the thread of history, unearthing astonishing forgotten mythologies.

The history of the places he investigates is as much a part of the work as the experimentation with the medium, whose limits he pushes beyond its two dimensions.

The artist's explorations of the mineral and chemical qualities of silver are reflected in his Zilverbeek project, in which he follows in the footsteps of the precious metal rejected by a photographic products company, as well as in his recent re-enactments of August Strindberg's celestographies and Lilly Kolisko's silver nitrate experiments.

He examines the problematics of alchemy and anthroposophy, questioning long-held processes and materials, and with them the place of humans and their rituals within their own history, discovering the quality of the links thus created.

Lucas Leffler is developing a performative practice of re-enactment that questions history and its writing. It
is neither a question of remaking history nor of repeating it, but rather of re-enacting for the present events or experiments that have been downplayed or even ignored by history. In this way, it participates in the contemporary principle of historical re-evaluation, in the sense of questioning the values that underpin it.

Yuna Mathieu-Chovet - 2021

Artist represented by Intervalle gallery