THREE NATURAL HISTORIES
Léa Bismuth

You have to imagine entering an open-air exhibition in a space open to living things and to the infinite fluidity of natural move- ment. We come face to face with different species in an immersion between kingdoms. This is access opened to living beings in a qualified and set manner, not to gain a hold on what is natural but in contrast to enter a dialogue in awareness with nature itself—as a complex concept. Here, nature is a tangible reality that we can move about in and bring in resonance with other fields: botany, zoopoetry and mineralogy, thus forming three natural histories, three stories, and three unities of works.

BOTANY
At the very beginning of the exhibition on the ground floor of the Musée Ziem, Coupoles (‘cupolas’) are displayed. They were made in 2012 with leaves of Elaeagnus, a genus of small bushy evergreen shrubs. The leaves have one silvery side and remain practically intact in time. Looking at the hemispherical cupolas from above reveals a certain brightness in their hollows. Scattered, they are like cups containing an offering placed on the floor. To describe what hap- pens we talk in terms of familiar materialism fed by a way of appropriating nature at our scale. Visitors can thus interact with the work that itself participates in a much broader approach. The familiar materialism involved operates not on but with living beings. And the artist can thus go into the street or walk through wasteland to find inspiration and substance for plastic transformation.
This is the approach used, remaining atten- tive to the beauties of nature and faithful to the curiosity of untiring botanists. A leaf of Monstera deliciosa collected at the Botanical Garden in Strasbourg became an engraving. All its ribs gained a graphic dimension as this leaf with all its aesthetic complexity became a design stamped on aluminium. For this, the artist worked with a coachbuilder specialised in sheet metal-formwork1. She made the leaf at the scale of the human body using the tools used in metal formwork. For us the plant is also a subject for ceaseless aesthetic astonishment with each rib becoming a plastic, almost eternal incarnation. It is by contact, as understood for the beginnings of photography, that these ribs leave their print on the metal plate. So perhaps the trace of a leaf of Monstera deliciosa should be kept as a relic. Looking at it, I think of botany and in particular of Francis Hallé who has combed primary tropical forests since the 1960s to make an inventory of the species that grow there in a gigantic atlas of families created first using sketches and then extremely precise drawings.
We can mention here a discussion with Hallé in the context of the exhibition ‘Nous les arbres’ (Trees) held in 2019-2020 at the Cartier Foundation. In a short extract he talks about his botanical work as an infinite human science2. He considers that it is cer- tainly not ‘pinning’ species as an entomolo- gist would do but rather living in tune with nature and understanding it closely in order to communicate with it. Here he talks of the distinction to be made between the artist—who can interpret nature and make it his own, for example by forging a bond between a leaf of a tree and an aluminium plate—and the botanist whose duty is sim- ply to respect what he sees to pass on the descriptions to future generations. Botanists also describe species that are becoming extinct. Hallé has worked meticulously for years on this study, continuing an ancient activity. He also reminds us that looking at living beings is a formidable tool and an otherness that is both fundamental for humans but also a foundation for possi- ble communication between human and non-human. He stresses the boundless discretion of trees that ask for nothing and grow according to their own laws. We must adopt this discretion by proposing condi- tions for their survival or by at least making an effort not to harm them. Although bio- diversity is so vast that we will certainly not have the time to discover everything that it has to say—especially at a time when it is under threat—it is still up to us to traverse it without destroying it.
Léa Barbazanges is a botanist in her own way because collection is at the heart of her approach. She thus seeks to draw attention to what grows, lives and surrounds us during our daily lives without us being aware of this. Whether she collects dust from a comet to depict it using oil pastel and dry chalk (in the work Poussière de comète de la mission spatiale Stardust, 2015) or several thousand dandelion seed plumes (3,700 in all!) to make a work with a living volume, she ceaselessly invites us to respect the move- ment of life. And this respect operates from its stellar origins to our most precarious little gardens. The dandelion plumes collected by the artist are attached by achenes, inde- hiscent fruits, i.e. that are able to open to release their seeds. Dandelion achenes have the feature of bearing pappus, the small plume of fibres that we blow on to make our dreams come true. The wind disperses the plumes, which can travel extremely long distances, flying and then multiplying. We talk in terms of dispersion—when a plant species becomes scattered. Might nature have intelligence? The discussion is still open among philosophers and sci- entists, but this intelligence must be qual- ified in plant and not cerebral terms. It is a question of specific life, a form of life that uses its means and fantastic capacities for development.
The major issue here is an artistic form of pollination. This will have resonance for all those who look at the magnificent picture of plumes. By making a hybrid of kingdoms—and by awarding a clearly pic- torial dimension to these dandelions—the artist has developed an art of weaving and makes her harvest a live source for the work. So let’s blow joyfully on these dandelions to change our viewpoint and finally rehabilitate species that have been forgotten or trampled on too many times. It is doubtless essential now to set a scenario for the possible to make thinking change and outline ecology as a study of environ- ments. This artistic ecology also places powerfully into perspective the relation between the beings in these environments. Here, Léa Barbazanges does precisely what Frédérique Aït-Touati, Alexandra Arènes and Axelle Grégoire wrote in Terra forma: she opens up ‘this inter-biome zone, an area of life that includes micro-resources hidden in the interstices of daily life 3’.

ZOOPOETRY
Insects and animals also have something to say. Flies first of all. In 2005, Léa Barbazanges made Page d’ailes, consisting of wings (ailes) of Calliphora vicina flies. This very common species is also called the bluebottle or blow- fly. These flies arouse disgust because of their meat-loving, necrophilic or scatopha- gous features and brushed away by people’s hands. But the artist makes a reminder: ety- mologically, Calliphora also means ‘bearer of beauty’. She takes some of these insects to make a small picture or a page of writing. Is it a kind of ex-voto or an extremely pre- cious reliquary but nonetheless made from almost nothing? Art is meditative here as the wings were assembled by hand—between each other and side to side during several long months of concentration. This created a dreamlike swarming landscape ‘as if the arrangement of the wings were a reminder of the frontal part of the fly’ observes the artist. Looking at this writing on an A4 page imme- diately leads to thinking of Robert Walser’s ‘microscripts4’ whose typographical signs are so small that they seem practically undeci- pherable by the naked eye. Writing with the invisible then: people the blank page with signs. Make a page of wings and return a degree of flight to the poem.
The minds of Jacques Derrida (L’Animal que donc je suis), Jean-Christophe Bailly (Le Parti pris des animaux) and also Élisabeth de Fontenay (Le Silence des bêtes) show this attention paid to animals interrelating with humans: the human looks at the ani- mal which in turn looks at the human in a reciprocal phenomenology. This is what the philosopher Anne Simon calls ‘zoopoetics5’, that is to say a literary approach based on closer contact between human and social sciences and life sciences, aiming at stressing ‘emphasis on the richness of the interactions between humans, other animals, plants, the atmosphere or minerals and attempting here to break down the Western category of ‘kingdoms’ that are distinct from each other and considered as being ‘natural’6. In imaging zoopoetics for this Page d’ailes, I think immediately of the manner in which Marguerite Duras describes the death of a fly in her book Écrire:
‘It was long. It struggled against death. It lasted for perhaps ten to fifteen minutes and then stopped. Life must have ceased. I stayed to see more. The fly stayed against the wall as I had seen it, as if bonded to it. I was wrong. It was still alive. I stayed to watch it in the hope that it would start to hope, to live. My presence made this death even worse. I knew that and I stayed. To see. To see how death would gradually invade the fly. And also to try to see where this death came from. From outside or from the depth of the wall or from the floor. From what night did it come, from the land or the sky, from the nearby forests or from a still unmentionable nothingness, very close perhaps, to me who tried to trace the trajectories of the fly in the process of entering eternity7.’
This description is so intense that all of us can say that we have never known how to observe the death of a fly: Duras gives no anatomical details but nonetheless seems to understand from inside the physiological phenomena taking place within the tiny body of the insect. She is the horrified mes- senger. What affects her and what affects us when we read this is that the death of the fly is nothing and of no importance for anybody. What is a death that is of no impor- tance? A death that nobody mentions. Page d’ailes awards eternity to the wings of flies that have disappeared. The page becomes a choreographic mass of absent bodies with perfect contours.
From flies, Léa Barbazanges goes to pigs, with an installation made using an assembly of several cauls. A caul is the membrane that encloses the viscera of the animal; it is very fine and transparent with milky notes. Here again, a little like the ribs of a large tropical leaf, the network of veins display magisterial arborescence in a natural layout, perfectly coralline. The work is hung and plays on its lightness, like a moving sail. We no longer see fat but an aquatic, ramified landscape. The artist’s work therefore consists of knowing how to pay attention to minuscule things, to show the minute while making it possi- ble to reveal its natural beauty and formal perfection.

MINERALOGY
Léa Barbazanges uses the motif to reveal the invisible. We thus understand why she can make concerted use of both pig caul and crystals. Indeed, take the work Cristaux – ennéagone (2010-2020) that formally refers
to the pork caul installation: both share a certain monumentality and bright trans- parency. She made it using calcite crystals. The dimensions chosen were like those of a door— 2.10 metres by 90 centimetres— and for the artist are an invitation to travel. We have to go through this door to enter a world that is both nocturnal and light, a kind of reassuring cave.
If Léa Barbazanges is interested in crystals, it is because they are minerals that obey a special regular and mathematic layout. This is when the artist becomes a crystallographer. The work Ligne de mica—made specially for the exhibition at the Musée Ziem in 2021—is in the form of a line 14 metres long. ‘Mica is very present around us, in nature. It is what can be seen shining in sand or pebbles’ says the artist who plays here on the shimmer- ing colours and their sparkle. The stones are made thin and laid out in sequences that are repetitive but never totally iden- tical. In 2019, Léa Barbazanges had carried out experiments with Sylvain Ravy, a CNRS researcher, for MicaPenrose in which the mica was worked for its brilliance and optical prop- erties but amplified to show a complex motif likely to be marvelled at for its structure. The artist appropriated the undulation of light by breaking it down like a soap bubble.
This trip made up of three natural histories takes us into an encyclopaedia in move- ment—consisting of creative freedom, atten- tion to forms and species and above all their potential. While Léa Barbazanges can find sources of inspiration in the sciences, she is nonetheless a poet, that is to say able to make forms say what they generally keep silent.
Léa Bismuth


Léa Bismuth is an art critic and freelance exhibition curator. She is currently working on a doctorate entitled ‘Ecrire : un passage à l’acte’ (‘Writing: get- ting it out’) at EHESS, Paris. She is also preparing an exhibition devoted to the emancipatory modes of our forms of life.


1. The person was Isaak Rensing of the coach-builders HH Services in Strasbourg.
2. See the online video: Francis Hallé, Web-série Nous les arbres, épisode 1/5, Paris, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63F1se_d9KE.
3. Frédérique Aït-Touati, Alexandra Arènes and Axelle Grégoire, Terra forma. Manuel de cartographies potentielles, Paris, Éditions B42, 2019, p. 154.
4. Mention can be made
of the exhibition ‘Robert Walser: Grosse kleine Welt. Grand petit monde’ at Les Beaux-Arts de Paris, 2018- 2019.
5. I refer to the book by Anne Simon published recently: Une bête entre les lignes. Essai de zoopoétique, Marseille, Wildproject, coll. ‘Tête nue’, 2021.
6. Anne Simon, ‘Présentation de la zoopoétique’, Animots. Carnet de zoopoétique, s. d., https://animots.hypotheses.org/ zoopoetique.
7. Marguerite Duras, Écrire, Paris, Éditions Gallimard, coll. « Folio », 1993, p. 39.

According to an ancient Renaissance concept dear to Michelangelo, the sculptor’s ambition is to find and reveal the form that is already contained in the material used. The artist Léa Barbazanges follows this tradition, with the exception that she does not «find», but rather reveals the design of the material in its pure and simple beauty. To «find» implies that one has moved away, that one has lost sight of the material in order to return to it. But for the artist, matter is king. Whether of plant, animal or mineral origin, natural matter is at the heart of his artistic process. Traditionally, an artist is defined by the technique he uses: painting, sculpture, drawing. Léa Barbazanges escapes this academic vision of art. Her work, singular and fascinating, developed over the last fifteen years, is neither painting, nor sculpture, nor drawing, while summoning them in a surprising and poetic way. Each work is the result of a long and unique process of collection, assembly and repetition. It all begins with the meticulous collection of materials taken from nature. Materials that are familiar to us, but a priori foreign to the field of plastic arts: fly wings, dandelion egrets, poppy petals, pigskin, clementine filaments, vine leaves, plane tree seeds... The artist explains: «I use organic materials because I want to talk about the living, about the life of each person. Gifted with an acute sense of observation and a curiosity free of prejudice, Léa Barbazanges knows how to see the plastic potential of materials from our daily lives but which we no longer observe with attention: a meticulous graphic design, a translucency, a colour, a shape.... Details that fascinate her and push her to explore the properties of these common materials, to reveal their extraordinary character.
Each encounter with a new material is an opportunity for a new challenge: developing a particular technique to make it durable. After the collection, comes the time of research and experimentation to find the right gesture. With meticulousness and patience, the artist tames the material to understand its substance and qualities. With respect and care, she tests the limits of the material in order to prove its resistance. From one piece to the next, the process is never the same. Everything is to be learned, invented and discovered. An original approach that seems to go back to the time of the First Men, when before painting cows and bulls on the walls of caves, our ancestors first had to find the natural materials (coal, iron oxide, ochre...) to make these paintings and find the means to make them durable (clay, talc...). But rather than using these natural materials to imitate nature, Léa Barbazanges works to show the raw material to reveal the incredible colours and patterns present in nature: the veins of white Carrara marble sanded to translucency (Marble Sheet, 2011); the structural organisation of calcite crystals (Crystals, 2012); the line that runs through dolomite stones (A Line of Magnesite in Dolomite, 2017); modelling the arrangement of atoms in a quasicrystal (MicaPenrose, 2019); the deep red of anthocyanin in grape leaves (Malbec, 2020); the mesh of plane tree seeds (Receptacle of a plane tree seed, 2009); the shimmering colours of mica, a birefringent crystal (Mica, 2020).
Panta rei! «Everything flows, nothing stays the same», according to the philosopher Heraclitus, for whom the origin of the world and of life is movement. A movement which, with time, alters beings and things. Léa Barbazanges’ achievement is to freeze this incessant movement at the heart of the natural cycle, to sublimate the fluid that creates these drawings and their cosmogonic colours in nature. Finally, the encounter of the work with the public is essential, because the artist’s process insists on the globality of perceptions and senses: matter, form, space... With an economy of means, the work confuses and surprises the spectator, who is invited to pay attention to the details, the shudders, the vibrations... It is a sensory, sensual experience that plunges us into a meditative state of awareness of the present moment and the environment. Astonishment is the poetic motor of Léa Barbazanges’ work, whose beauty borders on the visible, the better to question the essence of art and life.

Sonia Recasens
Art critic

Léa Barbazanges reconnects with the most archaic instincts of art, with early humans’ fascination with curios - those organic objects (fossils, minerals, shells…) that they collected because of their unusual form or how shiny they were and then safely stored away in caves. Léa Barbazanges is curious, in the strong sense of the term, meaning being both fascinated and caring. She works on their materiality to create sculptures and “organic aggregates” which intensify nature’s plasticity. Her work is both inspired by physical (accumulation, crystallization…) and artistic (drawing, collage, cutting…) processes and feeds a biomorphic imaginary world resulting in specific shapes influencing the living world. The same then can be said of the curiosity driving her and of the aesthetic effect produced by her work : the contemplative encounter with the « organic otherworldliness », to quote Roger Caillois, acts as a powerful stimulant for the imagination by experiencing, and maybe reinventing, man’s relationship with life.

Léa Barbazanges is not satisfied with any easy seduction and often uses ordinary, if not urban, organic materials. Her work is driven by a desire, in some ways romantic, to disturb the values of appreciation between noble and poor materials, to find gold even in the mud. The fly’s wing, for example, finds its aesthetic dignity in the fineness of its lines and the nuances of its grey transparency. Similarly, a veil made of pigskin reveals the aesthetic potential of the viscera, whose membrane would almost be equal to lace or silk. This reticularity, this rhizome, can be found in compositions based on clementine filaments, which, like the works in dolomites (the scraps from a quarry in Satka), sublimate the waste in order to make its existence persevere. His refusal of the precious nevertheless reaches its limits in the face of the metamorphic capacities of crystal, the chromatic depth of gold, the veins of marble or the delicacy of poppy petals, which offer him the opportunity to match the meticulousness of his execution, the precision of his technique, with the naturally sophisticated form of his material.

Beyond their formalism, the works of Léa Barbazanges offer the experience of a fragility that raises awareness of the precariousness of life. Her thread-like aesthetic gives this desire the means to express itself, extending from the microscopic (hair, dandelion, pine needles) to the most monumental (crystal threads 2m70 high or a 15m thread of fly wings). Through their vulnerability, the artist delivers her version of vanity, formulated as a response to the erosion of man’s link to his environment. In this tacit plea for the richness of life, a spider’s web or silkworms summon the image of the weaving of existence, while the use of insect wings or fish skins marks her interest in everything that resists putrefaction. Even minerality displays its own vitality, perceived through the use of a crystalline proto-biology or refractory stones, surviving rocks that resist extreme temperatures. In the image of her decomposing magnolia leaf sculpted in a thin copper plate, Léa Barbazanges thus produces forms that are as simple as they are fascinating, with concrete and symbolic force, through which she achieves, in her own way, the definition of art as a vital struggle, as a means of resisting death.

Florian Gaité

Spider threads, fly wings, «Eleagnus» leaves and clementine filaments are among the materials prized by Léa Barbazanges, who creates what she calls «organic assemblages». Author of works that are on the edge of the immaterial, her drawings in space, as well as her sculptures without weight are nevertheless present, both discreet and shining with a furtive brilliance, like that which nature sometimes offers to those who know how to see it. His works, which at first glance seem closer to a natural element from a cabinet of curiosities than to an artefact, intrigue and invite an approach that goes beyond that of the mere gaze: one wants to smell the petals of poppy flowers («Papaveraceae» and «Marble», 2012), to feel the softness of dandelions («Interior of egrets», 2013), to listen to the wind rustling in nori seaweed sewn together («Kim», 2014). The extraordinary meticulousness that each creation requires is easily forgotten, no toil or heaviness in this body of work where the air is king and the gesture is silent, as if in retreat from the wild beauty of the materials that compose it. The artist herself chooses a modest posture by naming her works after the elements she uses, posing herself not as a demiurge but as an accomplice, a joyful accomplice in the dialogue that is established in a low voice between her and the material. For it is clearly a pleasure for Léa Barbazanges to reveal, sometimes ephemerally, the plastic properties of the animal or vegetable particles she manipulates. Beauty thus emerges from the unexpected within this work, which knows how to reveal a world that has remained invisible to most of us and that we can no longer ignore once we have glimpsed it, like the camellia flowers seen by the eye of the painter in Sôseki’s novel: «These flowers bloom as suddenly as they fall: for hundreds of years they live quietly in the shadow of the mountains, far from any human eye. Once you’ve seen them, that’s the end! Whoever has seen them is no longer able to escape their magic (1).

Estelle Pietrzyk
1 Sôseki, «Oreiller d’herbes», Payot et Rivages, Paris, 1993, p. 124

Raffined, subtle, precious, exquisite, spider-like, the creations of Léa Barbazanges move, fascinate, disturb, amaze, bewitch. They offer discreet joys, secret pleasures, unhoped-for chances, disguised upheavals, a veiled and precarious happiness. Léa Barbazanges’ works are uncertain, ambiguous, floating, equivocal, changing, unstable, unforeseen. Sometimes they seem banal, sometimes they glow. Sometimes they hide in the shadows, sometimes they light up and blaze. Léa Barbazanges sculpts, builds, combines, adjusts and erects strange, enigmatic «things». She arranges them, she installs them. She assembles heterogeneous materials; she combines them; she articulates them; she grafts them; she marries and unites them. For example, several thousand translucent wings of flies are assembled edge to edge (2005). Poppy petals are attached to a support and their assembly moves with the slightest air movement (2011). Léa’s enigmatic «things» are fragile, ephemeral and persistent; they have a furtive glow and shine; they shine, they question; they dazzle. Léa Barbazanges’ artistic research is close to the philosophy of Vladimir Jankélévitch (1903-1985); it makes one think of the «I-don’t-know-what» and the «Almost-Nothing».
Gilbert Lascault

Xippas Gallery
Exhibition March 22nd to April 26th, 2014, Paris

This young artist, born in 1985, was discovered during the 58th Salon de Montrouge (2013) and has shown her work in several institutions in France and abroad (principally in Switzerland and Germany) since 2007.
Léa Barbazanges is a forager and a curious investigator. She is attentive to the environment and endeavors to gather materials of mineral and organic origin (both vegetal and animal). Léa Barbazanges’s artworks employ a vocabulary which she terms “organic assemblings” and which includes suspends gold leaves, crystals, white marble, dandelions seeds, spiderwebs, clementine pith, and Elaeagnus leaves. For her, each encounter with these materials is experienced as a new challenge. The artist must first understand the substance, discover how to manipulate it, and then brainstorm the appropriate shape, in order to reveal the hidden properties that were previously invisible to us.

While looking at these artworks, the spectator is confronted with fragments of reality that he has never seen before. The artist has enhanced reality by experimenting with its elements in an attempt to move beyond its limits and render the graphics extraordinary without any help from artifice. The rectangle of fly wings plays with transparency, the clementine pith forms an abstract drawing, the Elaeagnus leaves create wells of light, and the crystals brilliantly reflect light, which changes according to the source. The beauty of her work resides in the fragility of her works: a mere touch threatens them with disappearance. By attempting to render these ephemeral materials stable, Léa Barbazanges invites us to see the power within instability. There is nothing theatrical in these domestic artworks, no staging, nothing but a simple stand, which is always minimal and discrete and which allows the artwork to be shown. In her works, the spectacular reveals the extraordinariness of her process.

The strikingly beautiful and transparent Paroi de crépines was produced on sight in the final room of the exhibition and is a large ephemeral work that contrasts with most of the other pieces. This material that normally repels us becomes a translucent canvas fashioned from a fascinating network and it push us to question the way we look at the world around us. Moving beyond the question of the relationship between art and nature, Léa Barbazanges’s works must be approached, looked at, contemplated, and appreciated for their infinite fragility that they reveal.