Sébastien Léon
A Crack in My Cosmic Egg
Los Angeles
13 January - 15 February 2024
EXHIBITED WORKS
EXHIBITION Views
PREVIEW
PRESS RELEASE
Praz-Delavallade Los Angeles is pleased to present A Crack in My Cosmic Egg, the gallery's inaugural solo exhibition with artist Sébastien Léon. The exhibition will open on 13 January and will run through 15 February 2024.
Sébastien Léon was born in the town where da Vinci died. The great polymath was in Amboise, France, at the behest of King Francis I, acting as a court painter and royal army engineer. This is not only interesting, but salient, because young Sébastien was a frequent visitor to the museum of da Vinci’s inventions—the town’s greatest claim to fame aside from also being the birthplace of magician and creator of theatrical automatons Robert Houdin. All of this to say, Léon has been speaking the language of surrealism for a very long time, predisposed as he was to accept magic as not only real, but as a way of life. Later, when it was time to become an artist himself, like so many others on the path of new thought and spiritual questioning, he found himself in Los Angeles.
In a new exhibition centering around the impossible drawings in his book Psychodessins (Hat & Beard Press), Léon combines the long work of his inner travels with physical manifestations of the insights he discovered—is still discovering—in the realm of the psyche. In an expansive suite of mixed media works on paper, Léon has been channeling the automatic drawing process popular among André Masson and other Paris Surrealists—itself an expression of the era’s fascination with the nascent field of psychoanalysis and self-realization offered by figures like Carl Jung and Otto Rank.
These works embody the energy of waking dreams—organic color washes spread like waves as energetic ink drawing teases out emergent figures and images from the archetypes of the collective subconscious, and the inner truth of the artist. Serpents, mountains, stars, musical notations, elements of nature and architecture, scenes from childhood, text in many alphabets, faces, angels and demons, body parts, animals, vehicles, planets, water—so much water, rivers and lakes, seas and rain, warm showers and salty tears—and through it all the motif of a single man in silhouette, always on the move. The elusive balance between flow, instinct, and control that animates these remarkable works feels like an allegory for existence itself. And like a studied Jungian, Léon is keenly aware that in these drawings the recurring characters all represent himself, all his own contradictory aspects and the inter-dimensional observers with whom we all share space in our minds.
Building on the insights offered up by the “psychodessins,” Léon seeks to further discover facets of their meaning through other physical manifestations and mediums. A human figure, a theremin-enhanced automaton, invites viewers into a liminal space of strangeness and unself-conscious play. Paintings in the exhibition include a mesmerizing field of pattern, buzz, street lights, and invisible codes, across which our silhouetted traveler is seen to move; another is a palindromic portal, a literal door of perception per Huxley, which also continues the theme of rivers, crossings, and transformations. A site-specific mural weaves a vast tondo of Matisse-like dancer/divers, enacting interconnectedness in a zero-gravity space of art history, symbolism, and poetic narrative. Black like the traveling man, flickering like sinuous flames, the forms of these figures are further echoed in a flame of sandblasted black glass—an abstraction of the ego and a caution against allowing its weight to block magic’s delicate entry into the mind.
Through these and other unexpected visual strategies, Léon continues to search for the answers that reality cannot give you.
—Shana Nys Dambrot, 2024
