30 rue de Crussol , 75011 Paris
B-Side is a project located in the window of the rue de Crussol. On the edge of our programme, the gallery invites an artist with a remarkable body of work to create a dialogue with our current exhibition.
Olivier Leroi
Born in 1962 in Sologne (France)
Lives and works in Nançay (Cher) and Pays de Loire
Olivier Leroi's work has a surprising and invigorating poetic impertinence. Always intimately connected with his environment, the artist draws his inspiration from it, and his work is both rhetorical and composed of metaphorical or metonymic images. It is the expression, through word, image, form, mood and humour, of the simple vitality of the present. Leroi's handling of the material is always very minimal, bringing it back to its essential rhythm, the rhythm of meaning, of the multiple and mysterious aspects of existence.
Olivier Leroi's artistic production lends authenticity to our earthly sojourn, and is clearly a funny, striking and facetious spiritual task, because it is endowed with an ironic and poetic dimension. They constitute a kind of language gap in a distortion of meaning and perception, each work functioning as a device to be disturbed and questioned with pleasure because they privilege life and the embodied enjoyment of reality. Olivier Leroi's work resists classification. His work focuses on the natural environment, from meadows to African deserts, with nothing morose about it, expressing an enchanted and euphoric relationship with the world.
In the sculpture entitled Souffle, he presents a taxidermied perch from whose mouth a bubble of blown glass escapes, carrying the fish up into the air, so that miraculously it is no longer out of the water but suspended. By moving away from common sense in this way, he invents a singular meaning that opens up his own hypotheses and questions, those of an acute awareness of the world - in short, a tender invitation to philosophy.
Florence Beaugier
