Ivan Le Pays: A Line Alone

81 Leonard Gallery is pleased to present Ivan Le Pays: A Line Alone, on view from April 13th through May 30th, 2023. For the occasion of the artist’s first solo exhibition in the United States, Le Pays has created a new body of paintings in response to the California landscape. With mountains reaching toward the sky and hills sloping into winding roads—all detailed in fine linework—Le Pays captures the sublime through simplicity. 

Le Pays, from Paris, first visited California in 2019. He recalls following the lines of the desert in his car, getting purposefully lost and documenting his surroundings in film photography. He returned in 2022 to shoot the film A Line Alone, produced by Arc’teryx. The film explores the relationship between the body and the landscape through three media: tattooing, painting, and climbing. During the film, Le Pays records climber Ashima Shiraishi’s ascent, slashing acrylic paint on canvas to trace her movements. The result of this collaboration is Le Pays’ Sequences, one of which is on view in the gallery alongside a screening of the film.

Also featured in the film is the artist’s process of extracting lines from the natural environment, using a glass plate as both a viewfinder and drawing surface. Back in the studio, Le Pays referenced his plein-air sketches and photographs to create a visual vocabulary for this body of work. 99shapes of California contains pictographs of the California landscape, informing the layered compositions in A Line Alone. Edges and curves of terrain, carved by both human and natural forces, become harmonious geometry in colorful, abstract arrangements. 

Across the work, elongated shapes have an upward motion, energetically pointing to the sky, and in the Vertical Horizon series;the sky itself is the subject. The scale of the canvases mirror the body standing tall and the verticality of the California mountains, while the shifting colors capture the transitions between day and night. Le Pays has an obsession with height. He strives for it as a climber and artist, craving both the thrill and the view. Through the essential elements of line and color, Le Pays captures the beauty of the natural world and the transcendental experience of adventuring within it.

Ivan Le Pays: A Line Alone is open for viewing Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday, 12-6pm, through May 30th, 2023. No appointment necessary. 

Ivan Le Pays (b. 1992 Nantes, France) is a Paris-based multimedia artist. He holds a Masters in Anthropology and Design from the Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts (2016). While studying Chinese for seven years, he discovered calligraphy, and the line became a language to express his geometric vision of the world. He is currently a resident artist at Ateliers Wonder in Paris. @ivanlepays