Appearances
Lionel Sabatté

The works brought together in Apparitions seem caught in a state of unstable transformation, straddling the boundary between geological phenomena and the emergence of life. The forms never appear fully fixed. They emerge slowly from the material, as if at the moment of a shift: a landscape becomes a face, oxidation becomes an animal presence, a mineral surface suddenly seems to be traversed by life.

Chemical reactions, deposits and the spread of oxidation play an essential role here. The painting becomes a space of transformation where figures appear just as much as they dissolve. Some works evoke realms predating any identifiable form, whilst others give the sensation of witnessing the fragile emergence of a body, a gaze or a creature.

Straddling abstraction, materiality and organic presence, Apparitions explores that uncertain moment when the living seems to emerge from the mineral, when the faces themselves seem to return to the landscape from which they originated.

Echoing the theme ‘Moving from one dream to another’, the exhibition offers a journey through shifting territories, where the boundaries between matter, memory and apparition become porous. Lionel Sabatté’s works open up a space of unstable perception, between the disappearance and birth of forms, as if each image belonged simultaneously to several states of reality.