Artistic approach
With simple movements, Olivier Leroi transforms objects he has observed and taken from the environment. His work is about relationships with the surroundings. From something that he has seen or found unfolds a proposition that often contains something else within. As one idea leads to another, the artist moves from one medium to another. Sometimes a landscape is born from the transformation of a feather, other times, a film requires a trip in a helicopter or a drawing uses only a pencil. His motivation always comes from reality - what does it look like? How to approach it? How can we be part of it, represent it and share the best of it? These are just some of the questions that underpin the approach of an artist whose key works are open to multiple interpretations, as singular as they are unexpected.
Olivier Leroi's work reveals a sensitive and poetic exploration of the world, rooted in meticulous observation and an intimate connection with nature and reality. His propositions question our perception of time, memory and the links we forge with those around us. “We often see time as something linear: birth, life, death and so on. Personally, I feel like a point that is more or less present, close to both my birth and my death. I have an awareness, even a hyper-awareness, of the passage of time”, explains the artist. This perception transforms each of his works into an invitation to experience the present as an eternal moment, both fragile and essential.
Each work functions as a device to disrupt and enhance our perception. By transforming shapes and materials using different techniques, Olivier Leroi invites us to look beyond the obvious. These creations are rooted in joyful vitality and give us all a chance to rediscover the beauty around us, far from arbitrary classifications.
"As such, his works can be seen as tools for understanding and interpreting reality in all its diverse manifestations. Whether it’s Christ or Pinocchio embodied in alder, an “artist's mother” in duck confit, or a house in a wild goose feather, everything seems to emerge clearly through the magic of association, by activating memory to classify and make connections, along with the artist’s hands that create the shapes, through precise gestures of cutting, extracting or drilling. Beyond form, it is this path of establishing links that Olivier Leroi shares with the viewer. And while everyone can agree that his work is funny, this is not an end in itself, but rather the happy consequence of a way of looking at things that brings out a singular state of presence," explained art critic Marguerite Pilven in 2017.
Far from aiming to demonstrate, Olivier Leroi's creations aspire to precision. Many of his projects illustrate this quest and require the artist to work in collusion with the “other”, whether living or not. A capacity for connection that goes hand in hand with an acute sense of poetry: “Poetry is like a place. When you read, you are in the poem’s present, in a place at the heart of the world”. This is how a vision is affirmed: the present is a poetic space where the viewer is invited to share a direct sensory experience.
The project for the Domain of Chaumont-sur-Loire focuses not on nature in general, but on the environment in the broadest sense, on the links that can be forged between “things”, as well as on the phenomenon of appearance. Olivier Leroi's work centres on a certain gallinaceous species, and more specifically, its plumage. He created some fifty drawings using Reeves’s pheasant feathers, linked to parallel works installed in large cedars in the Historic Grounds. On a tree overlooking the path, we find an owl with asymmetrical eyes, one representing the Earth and the other the Moon; on another, between the stables and the château, a mirror opening to another dimension. And much more besides... All these works remind us constantly that, in a time where we are often too distracted, observing, experiencing and contemplating are poetic acts in themselves, a way of being fully in the moment.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Born in Sologne in 1962, Olivier Leroi trained as a forester in Meymac, Corrèze, while at the same time developing his interest in art through personal encounters. In 1995, he joined the Institut des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques, directed by Pontus Hulten. Informed by this experience, he developed a body of work in drawing and sculpture whose common thread is relationships with the surroundings. "The work comes into being through an exchange that it crystallises, becoming part of a materiality that it surveys and amplifies", wrote Marguerite Pilven. Based on an economy of gesture and means, his shifting and sliding movements are imbued with humour and dreamlike poetry that offer new perspectives, if not a new reality - giving his works a quasi-performative dimension. These include a number of “lived works” produced during residencies, such as Première neige en pays Dogon, in Mali, El Zorro blanco, in Mexico, and La brigade de Chambord, in France. For public commissions, he endeavours to link the context and what emerges in his experience: Abscisses-ordonnées, Collège du Brunoy (91), Une molécule d'eau dans l'eau, Lycée du Giennois (45), Vingt et une histoires dans le vent, Collège de Thiant (59), Les 5 sens, Institut des Neurosciences de la Tronche-sur-Isère (38), 1020 km, Mont-Gerbier-de-Jonc (09), helicopter film.
