[NO]S ARCHIPELS

The result of a fruitful collaboration between Léo Lefort — Atelier LK’ and Sébastien Rocher — ShowLab, this immersive exhibition features large- and medium-format paintings, original icons, design objects, lighting, and inclusive furniture. Inspired by the concept of an archipelago, the exhibition explores the potential connections between different spaces and territories, interweaving materials, narratives, and uses.


Nomadic artist Léo Lefort presents a pictorial universe that is simultaneously intimate, organic, and symbolic, where gestures interact with the essence of motifs and the composition of materials. [NO]S ARCHIPELS transforms Les Salorges into an ephemeral port of call where ordinary objects, reveries, aesthetics, and a form of geopoetics embodied by artifacts “in a certain assembled order” converge.

Large-format canvases stand alongside a series of recently created icons from the Upper Valais region of Switzerland. These icons are fragments of writing, shards of gold, and figurations and reliefs intertwined in fine a-temporality — agglomerations of scraps gathered here and there.

Léo Lefort, an iconoclast and an unorthodox iconodule, explores the tensions between the sacred and the profane, myth and reality, and materiality and transcendence. His works, which are as much mental landscapes as ritualized surfaces, borrow from Byzantine traditions, religious illuminations, traditional Ethiopian paintings, popular imagery, and technological avant-gardes to reconfigure them. Using raw linen, lime, copper leaf, cobalt, and vine black, Léo composes intimate cartographies and palimpsests removed from a world in perpetual mutation.

Created in close harmony with the architectural space of Les Salorges, the pieces interact with the selected objects, lighting, and furniture. This body of work is an extension of his research begun in Addis Ababa, Dubai, London, Rabat, Liège, and his studio in Saint-Florent-le-Vieil, as well as his collaborations with exceptional craftspeople: Manufacture Drugeot and the stained glass workshop, as well as the island of Noirmoutier, which has been a regular port of call for over forty years.

Here, each piece becomes a collection, a passageway, and a realm of possibilities.

The exhibition is a transdisciplinary curatorial act at the crossroads of function, form, narrative, and imagination. It acts like a constellation: fragmented, shifting, and archipelagic.

Louise Auberel, Crans-Montana, April 2025