David Lefebvre
David Lefebvre paints images cut out of magazines or downloaded from a mobile phone, screenshots or—and in particular—found on the Internet. They are often indifferent in quality, and banal in appearance. There are people and landscapes, portraits of friends and others, the countryside and the city. They appear, as he says, "in no special order", but are points of departure for paintings in oil on canvas. He starts with an impoverished, low-definition image, and does not try to dissimulate the fact, but takes it through to the completed work. The "unfinished" aspect which, some years ago, left a blank "white square" on the canvas as a witness to the material substratum of the painting, but also a signifier of on-screen censorship, has now given way to fuzziness created by a "net" effect that stands out against a background whose realistic appearance is reinforced by the contrast. The "stained glass" look produced by the grouped cells constitutes, in reality, a coding or an encryption of the palimpsest, which remains present in the final image, but, in a sense, as a cipher. By the same token, it signs its own loss of data—a gap dissimulated, as though by camouflage. Lefebvre pushes the …
David Lefebvre paints images cut out of magazines or downloaded from a mobile phone, screenshots or—and in particular—found on the Internet. They are often indifferent in quality, and banal in appearance. There are people and landscapes, portraits of friends and others, the countryside and the city. They appear, as he says, "in no special order", but are points of departure for paintings in oil on canvas. He starts with an impoverished, low-definition image, and does not try to dissimulate the fact, but takes it through to the completed work. The "unfinished" aspect which, some years ago, left a blank "white square" on the canvas as a witness to the material substratum of the painting, but also a signifier of on-screen censorship, has now given way to fuzziness created by a "net" effect that stands out against a background whose realistic appearance is reinforced by the contrast. The "stained glass" look produced by the grouped cells constitutes, in reality, a coding or an encryption of the palimpsest, which remains present in the final image, but, in a sense, as a cipher. By the same token, it signs its own loss of data—a gap dissimulated, as though by camouflage. Lefebvre pushes the limits back ever further. And in this case he ventures beyond a hypothetical transcendence of the image.
Lefebvre’s solo exhibitions include Centre d’art Oui, Grenoble, Galerie Zürcher, Paris, Zürcher Studio, New York, Villa Saint-Cyr, Bourg-la-Reine. Group exhibitions include Musée-Château d’Annecy, Centre d’art Contemporain, Meymac, Galerie Zürcher, Paris, Centre d’art Oui, Grenoble, Cosma e Damiano, Venise, Béton Salon, Paris, Ambassade de Hongrie, Berlin, Fondation KOGART, Budapest, and Alliance Française, Venice.
Courtesy of Galerie Zürcher
