January 8 — February 26, 2022

For this second exhibition at the Perrotin gallery in Paris and the fifth
in this same gallery on the international scene, Lee Bae has chosen
to show five series of works as well as a large installation, all
recounting his last twenty years of work.

We find the series Issu du feu, with its famous paintings made with pieces
of charcoal; Landscape, defined by these large abstract landscapes radi-
cally separated into two spaces, one white, the other black; Untitled,
composed of canvases designed with charcoal ink and acrylic medium.
And we discover two new series, never before shown in France: the first,
Brushstroke, composed of large-scale papers from which emerge shapes
painted in charcoal ink; and the second, Issu du feu (White lines), cha-
racterized by pieces of charcoal on canvas topped with small white lines.

The ensemble reminds and highlights that—whatever the medium, the
techniques, the disciplines—Lee Bae’s work, since its beginnings in
1990, affirms the same purpose: the quest for black. Black in all its states,
in all its forms, in all its lights, in all its depths and even sometimes in its
reflections.

In Issu du feu, black—the blacks, we should say, as Lee Bae represents
their range from deep black to almost light gray—evoked by the multiple
pieces of charcoal that the artist juxtaposes and sticks together, reveals
itself under multiple facets: he plays with its shine, with it iridescent
effects, with its pearly aspects born from the impression of movements
on the surface.

In Untitled it is the opposite: black is shown in its depths, born from the
density of the charcoal ink used to draw shapes and heightened by the
contrast with the white surfaces that define their outlines. Like a black
hole, the tones of black pull the eye into endless perspectives – a call that
we also feel with the Landscape series, whose radical geometric compo-
sitions, sometimes like cliff edges, create an echo between black and
white to further intensify their juxtaposition.

In his recent large works on paper, Lee Bae puts movement in his blacks
and deploys the gradations of their transparency. Contrary to the Untitled
series where each shape is meticulously drawn several times superim-
posed, in Brushstroke, each shape or symbol drawn in charcoal ink is the
result of a single gesture, without possibility of remorse and of an abso-
lute brilliance that combines both mental concentration and corporeal
control. Close to calligraphy, this writing, which in its way relates to a tra-
ditional method, testifies at the same time to a highly contemporary spirit
and an immanent touch and presence.

For Issu du feu (White lines), Lee Bae resumes his compositions with
pieces of charcoal, but he forms a pattern and punctuates them on the
surface with small lines in white oil pastel, like commas on a blackboard.
In this way, he puts black in the background and gives it even more pers-
pective.

Finally, in his installations, always made with burnt wood or charcoal, Lee
Bae puts black in relief. He puts it in a ball, in a bundle, or in a point to
show that black can also be perceived as modeled, as protuberance. And
that whatever its aspect, this color with its innumerable nuances allows
him to speak about time, space, energy, body, soul. And thus, about life.

Henri-François Debailleux
December 2021

January 8 — March 12, 2022

Perrotin is dedicating its first monographic exhibition on Yves Laloy
(born in Rennes in 1920; died in Cancale in 1999). Some fifty works
will be on view in both gallery spaces on avenue Matignon and rue
de Turenne. Yves Laloy’s work has not been featured in a major exhi-
bition since 2004, in a retrospective at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in
Rennes. Two of his emblematic works from that museum’s collec-
tions will be exceptionally presented here.

Yves Laloy began his career as an architect, before turning definitively to
painting in 1950. From the start, he began exhibiting in Parisian galleries
devoted to Surrealism, which resonated with the wordplay and irony
nestled in his work. In 1958, André Breton orchestrated an exhibition for
him at the Galerie La Cour d’Ingres, and wrote a laudatory preface to the
catalog. A few years later, Breton selected his painting Les Petits pois
sont verts, les petits poissons rouges… (1959) as the cover image for his
book Le Surréalisme et la peinture. Laloy himself was never part of the
Surrealist movement; he developed his work around a multifaceted
‘plastic’ vocabulary, ranging from rigorous geometric compositions to
undulating, cosmogonic worlds. His works have been exhibited in Paris,
Milan, Basel, and within larger exhibitions devoted to Surrealism, including
the 1991 homage to André Breton at the Centre Pompidou. His
independent nature and the rarity of his work have bestowed him with a
fairly discreet artistic status, known mainly amongst lovers of Surrealism.
The polyphony of this hard-to-classify œuvre and its unconventional
curiosity invite us to look at these paintings today in a different light. They
are replete with the mysteries of the cosmos and the unconscious.

While Laloy’s spiritual dimension is forcefully expressed in the work,
another singularity is clear, even to those looking at it today: he was a
“sampler” of extremely heterogenous influences, in a way that is ultimately
quite unconventional in postwar art. [...]
In the early 1950s, various avant-gardes coexisted in Paris, some long
established, others more recent: lyrical abstraction, the abstract
landscaping of the New School of Paris, art brut, the miserabilism of
Bernard Buffet; while in the United States, abstract expressionism was
causing a revolution. Certain of Laloy’s paintings seem to be “more” of
one or another of these, but never in a confrontational way, and indeed
while we can often see similarities in his works of the 1950s and 1960s
to Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Auguste Herbin (who unveiled his “Plastic
Alphabet” in 1946), and above anything else, to the works of the painter
and tapestry designer Jean Lurçat, popular in Paris since the 1930s, the
particularities of these paintings is to summon all these sources at once,
“mixing”—as we say today—the contributions of one with those of
another, combining sequences from one with the DNA of another. In his
paintings, Laloy makes several languages coexist, each belonging to the
figurative or abstract universe, in compositions always, notoriously,
asymmetrical. And more importantly, he adds to theses universes a full
pantheon of influences from both the so-called minor arts and cultures
from beyond Western art’s conventional perimeter—thirty years before
William Rubin showed, with the exhibition “Primitivism” in 20th Century
Art at MoMA in New York in 1984, what can, in a certain light, unite
contemporary and tribal art. Thus, in Laloy’s paintings we see not only
sampling from Kandinsky, Herbin, and Lurçat, but patterns inspired by
Panamanian Indian fabrics, Incan potter, and Native American sand
paintings, an early celebration of the “Magiciens de la Terre.1”

Eric Troncy, extract of Vision, exhibition catalog Yves Laloy,
Perrotin