Les vagues et le rivage
Eden Rock Gallery, from its location at the beach of the iconic hotel Eden Rock – St Barths, along with Galerie Perrotin and Art Saint Barth, promoting the island as an international art destination, invite French artist Lionel Estève. When he came to St Barth in order to prepare this solo exhibition, knowing the possibilities and get a sense of the island, the artist was immediately marked and impressed by the sea’s omnipresence, its blue shades and its complexity: its transparencies, its depths, its lights and its changing surface. To express his perception and pay tribute to this endless blue palette, Lionel Estève naturally chose to use glass, in the technique that seemed to be the most appropriate: the “fusing” one.
For over a year, the artist has been experimenting in various glass workshops with this “fusing” technique. New for him, he faced—alone and naive—this technique which usually don’tgive way to improvisation, with new interrogative and creative perspectives.
This technique consists in working the glass as a thick plate while it is cold, covering it with different colored glass powders, and finally firing it in the oven to merge a superposition of transparent layers. Because of this, the drawings are very long and meticulous to do. As for all fire professions, the “fusing” process is slow, difficult to control and requires a lot of tests.
The exhibition presents a series of ambiguous “Marines” which transpose both an intention of figuration and abstraction of the artist. “Would the horizon be an abstraction? What about the lines and curves which compose the waves?” Les Vagues et le rivage is an abstract and symbolic tribute to the Caribbean sea.
