YOU ARE MY FREEDOM / I AM YOUR PRISON (2013)

YOU ARE MY FREEDOM / I AM YOUR PRISON
Drawings / Paintings by Stephane Leonard
July 19th – September 1st 2013
Galerie im Turm, Berlin

„For his new series YOU ARE MY FREEDOM / I AM YOUR PRISON Stephane Leonard works with lacquer and spray paint on top of large-scale prints on canvases. He overlays the found prints, conceals messages and erases images. The information and photographs which lie under the drawings and colour represent and stand for all the things we do not know, we do not see, and we cannot understand.

The works are divided into geometric shapes, interrupted by running lacquer, splashes of colour, engraved lines and mists of spray paint. Achromatic colours dominate the canvases. What remains are solely blurred hints and fragments of text and photographs, hiding in between overlapping semi-transparent layers.

Stephane Leonard is a drawer. Lines compress to shapes or drift apart. These lines are the remnants of a process which also remain present on his canvases. Lines, not only that are the traces that leave the spray painting and the running lacquer behind on the prints, but also the sections between two geometric shapes. They nebulize and blur on the canvases, as if one would zoom in on the drawing and greatly extend it. Are these signs on the canvases information, that are supposed hint at something? 

For years Stephane Leonard has been investigating issues like communication and limits of expressiveness through his work. The title line YOU ARE MY FREEDOM describes the possibility of free thinking. I AM YOUR PRISON stands for the inability to express the interior and make oneself understood. The slash (/) stands for the border between the inside and the outside. A barrier only permeable on one side. Thus it allows us to absorb everything but not to understand it instantly and to not having the ability to give an appropriate form of expression to our emotions and thoughts.” (Lena Fliessbach)

pictures from the series + installation view at Galerie im Turm in Berlin:

pictures from the opening night and the special event „Troy von Balthazar performing inside the exhibition“: