COLLABORATION EXCLUSIVE
[NO]S ARCHIPELS • Fine Art & Design
Les Salorges, Noirmoutier-en-l’Île
July 5 au 12, 2025
Daily, 9am à 7pm
VERNISSAGE, Saturday, July 5, 6 – 8pm
MUSICAL IMPROVISATIONS, Friday July 11, 6pm
FINISHING, Saturday July 12, 2pm – 4pm
It’s not a question of fleeing the world, but of opening it up.
La Figure du dehors, Kenneth White, Éditions Grasset, 1982
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
MUSICAL IMPROVISATIONS Friday July 11, 6pm
To name an object is to remove three quarters of the enjoyment of the poem, which consists of gradually guessing; to suggest it is the dream.
Letter from Stéphane Mallarmé to Henri Cazalis, April 30, 1867
Perhaps we shouldn’t reveal too much about this impromptu encounter between actor Laurent Lafuma; guitarist, sound effects artist, and wave tinkerer, Julien Taillefer; and saxophonist, Artus. However, it would be accurate to say that this evening of musical improvisation will stir up the waters of all the sound archipelagos you know and frequent, to which your memories cling. The unexpected and the unheard come together for a mysterious, sublime, and unforgettable musical aperitif.
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Artus, an eclectic saxophonist with diverse horizons, draws his line between classical influences, klezmer traditions, jazz repertoire, and popular song. Trained at the Conservatoire de Normandie, Artus offers a musical exploration through this carte blanche, constructed as an intimate and lively narrative, blending breath, memory, and landscape… He brings together the oriental fragrances of the Madonna of Cairo, the oceanic iodine and his memories of Noirmoutier, in a free performance where the saxophone tells a story, escapes and carries us away…
Laurent Lafuma, actor and photographer, navigates between stage, image, and narrative. From Jean-Michel Rabeux’s theater to television (Mathieu Schwartz) and film sets (Sophie Boudre), he traverses formats with an ardent curiosity, an unquenchable passion, and a keen poetic sensibility. Co-creator of the play Famadine Van Gogh (2020), curator and mastermind of the No-MoMA exhibition, author of an unusual film essay on Bosch and Queen Ranavalona III, he enjoys weaving connections between the strange, the ordinary, and the beyond. Between brilliance and vertigo.
Julien Taillefer, a sound sculptor of the finest kind, manipulates strings, particularly those of guitars, as one might run through a field on a rainy, stormy evening beneath a high-voltage power line: noises, textures, undulations, sudden bursts—everything becomes material for transforming the chaos of life into a harmonious opus.
A virtuoso landscape architect of acoustics and high-end sound designer (as a sound engineer, he is sought after by the big names of the contemporary French scene), Julien delicately crafts electroacoustic layers. Neither homage nor pastiche, his piece transcends Debussy, straying from the beaten path to wander elsewhere—where sound breathes and drifts between imaginary and distant islands…
