Galerie Lara Vincy.

The war theatre contains danger zones. Strategic zones, be they offensive or defensive. Surveillance zones, or fallback or awaiting. The scenery of this bloody theatre, past or present, manipulates stooges, weapons, objects, accessories, signifying battle and hierarchy. Léa Le Bricomte has spent the last few years deciphering the codes of this theatre by taking over all its component parts: concrete and symbolic. The artist reroutes the objects of war, taken from variegated and hybrid civilizations in two antithetical dimensions; war and spirituality. To the super–technological drones, Léa Le Bricomte provides an answer by means of a collaboration with carrier pigeons, equipped with micro-cameras. Pigeons were utilized during World War One to transmit information from one trench to another. The flying animal was regarded as a tool of communication. In order to downplay the infallible aspect of warlike surveillance, the artist re-injects an organic part, simultaneously animal and human. A random and imprecise part, which underlines the vanity and absurdity of the fights. We find there an interaction between grains of corn and an exploded mortar shells. The artist combines two warlike elements: industrial and shamanic. Further along, she displays a gilt Mandala made up of hundreds of fire-arms’ cartridges. The work, the result of a ritual borrowed from Hinduism, combines war and peace. In the same way, she reformulates the Stupa (sacred Buddhist architecture), by means of a missile and a wooden basis. The associations of forms and references engender a symbolic power wherein violence is overshadowed in a favour of a mystical, meditative and altruistic opening.

Léa Le Bricomte treads on a thorny area, that of ideologies. Through the appropriation of warlike and fascistic leftover residues, she provides of a profoundly humanist and pacifist statement. Thus, a Hitlerian stamp is covered all over by handwritten mantras. Repetition leads to overtaking.  The artist also dips Tibetan flags into a bath filled with Indian ink. The ink here has a dual significance; it symbolizes simultaneously covering-up (domination) as well as reconciliation and resilience. Thus the objects of violence and of power are re-routed, re-incarnated and rehabilitated by new powers. Like a Ying-Yang, human nature is envisaged as a dual and complementary entity, endowed with a luminous side and an obscure side. By taking over the warlike objects and lexicon, Léa Le Bricomte overturns its dark and pugnacious facet. Without ever avoiding it or denying it, she works it over like a material in order to bring forth a new substance: humanistic, peaceful, harmonious and entertaining.

 

Julie Crenn

 

translated in English by Ann Cremin

 

 

On the occasion of this second solo show in the Galerie Lara Vincy (after War Room in 2012) Léa Le Bricomte is showing a new group of objects re-routed from weapons and ammunitions, the primal matter of her work since its beginnings, especially a resonant mandala, made up of hundreds of assembled cartridges, of videos captured by carrier pigeons used as drones, as well as lamps in the shape of molecules of explosives.

 

The gallery re-published War Room, a volume carried out from the model of the one published in the framework of her residency – Creations and mediation – for the European Tap project, in Calais in 2014. With our thanks to the Communauté d’Agglomération Cap Calaisis and to all those who enabled the accomplishment of this project.

 

Léa Le Bricomte was born in 1987 in Montbard, France.

Lives and woks in Paris. Represented by the Galerie Lara Vincy since 2012.

Award winner of the Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2012, she has practiced performances since 2007 and developed, in parallel, a painterly practice.

 

selection of recent exhibitions:

 

2016

- W/W, Art, Femmes et Guerre, La Maison des Arts Rosa Bonheur, Chevilly-Larue/F - War Room 3, Faux Mouvement hors les murs, Forbach/F (solo)

 

2015

- Tropical War, LAC, Ile de la Réunion/F (solo)

 

2014

- Monument, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Calais/F

- Monument, Frac Basse-Normandie, Caen/F

- Combats pour la liberté, Le Radar, Bayeux/F

- War Kit Beach, galerie L’œil Histrion, Hermanville-sur-Mer/F (solo)

 

2013

- Dépaysement, les félicités des Beaux-Arts de Paris, le 104, Paris/F

- Poétique d’objets, LAAC, Dunkerque/F