Lemonier in his studio. Courtesy of TM Projects.
Arthur Lemonier is speaking to me from his Parisian studio ahead of his first London show, Of this elusive, I’m an accomplice at TM Projects in collaboration with the Art Office. “[The name] is an ode to my familial heritage, while also referencing themes that are close to my heart.” he tells me. “My father was a huge fan of Mylène Farmer. I finally went to see her in concert at the end of September. The song that both me and my father have loved for so long is Sans Logique, where she speaks about the conflict between her angelic and her evil sides. I’ve always been very attracted to these large-scale concepts, extremes, paradoxes, ideas that complete themselves, so I took the lyrics ‘dans ce paradoxe, je ne suis complice’ and made them more a part of my world.”
The show features a series of new paintings by the Parisian artist, depicting close-ups of faces and bodies in vivid hues of greens, purples and yellows. Lemonier’s subjects live in oscillatory states of agony and ecstasy: faces scrunch up, bodies contort and buckle, flesh is pushed and pulled, eyes roll backwards in fits of saintly rapture. The eyes slide off-canvas, rarely acknowledging the viewer, but their expressions and movements take up entire plots of emotional and physical space. There is an overtly otherworldly tone to Lemonier’s work: the small-scale canvases are taken up entirely by swathes of shining flesh, flashing teeth and sheened skin illuminated by a simultaneously harsh and ethereal lustre, somewhere between the chiaroscuro of Caravaggio and the neon fairytale of gas stations lighting.
Courtesy of TM Projects
“To me, figurative painting has always been a way to identify and explore corporeal connections,” he explains. “That’s where the colors come from; I wanted to deform and explore something that isn’t quite of this world. Flesh-coloured faces don’t interest me. It’s nice for other people, but I just don’t see any correlation between my own interior world and an overtly natural style. Faces are the primary way that people connect. I want them to feel gigantic, omnipresent. I don’t want anything else like the shape of weight of the subjects or their bodies to be known. The small-scale plays really well with this idea, of seeing how far you can push this.”
Despite being French, Lemonier’s work falls quite elegantly into the canon of the late twentieth-century London school: there’s some Auerbach in the swiftness of his brushwork, some Freud in the contortion of his perspective, some Bacon in the overt psychology of his subjects. But his inspirations are much more varied: “I’m very inspired by [German-Austrian sculptor] Messerschmidt.” he admits. “Especially the sculptures of these ever-howling faces - they’re from the 1700s but they feel extremely contemporary.”
Courtesy of TM Projects.
He also counts Colleen Barry, Chloe Wise and Sasha Gordon amongst his contemporary muses. “I know I’ll be affected by an artist if I go to any exhibition and I lose myself. When I saw Otto Dix’s Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden (1926) it was the start of something – she was a muse, and very androgynous, it was so emblematic of the 20s and 30s. There’s a term when describing a connection with a painting which is indescribable. I’m not falling into the cliche of this art healed me – I’m too stoic for that – but this painting was a starting point for everything.” Lemonier started painting three years ago, but he admits that his work was “originally much darker” until relatively recently. “I worked with green and black all the time. Then I underwent some changes in my personal life, and there was a shift.” The result was a self-defined system of consciousness and liberation and a renewed interest in research and regeneration. “I hate doing the same thing over and over again!” he laughs.
Returning to the title of the exhibition, Lemonier explains, “The term elusive is more tailored to the idea of the ungraspable. It’s a bit of a melting pot of everything I’ve found in the quest for identity: androgyny is how I’ve lived my everyday life since I was a teenager. Blurring boundaries and always leaving things in fluctuation or with a question mark is how I go through life. It also speaks to transidentity and to the direction that I take my work in that it deals with concepts of intersexness – not necessarily in the biological way, but by addressing the idea that there is always something more complex, something beyond the binary.”
When asked what he hopes the audience will take away from the show, Lemonier pauses. “There will be people who hate it and people who will adore it.” he explains. “In general my work speaks to people, but interpretations are always different. There have been discussions around the concepts of non-binarity and androgyny. That being said, interpretation always lies with others and I have no power over that.” The curation of Of this elusive, I’m an accomplice, he explains, was defined by this exact desire to produce a varied panel of emotions. TM Projects was founded earlier this year by Tina Maslakova, with an inaugural London Fashion Week project followed by a curatorial venture at the Sarabande Foundation (established by Alexander McQueen in 2006 and named after the SS07 show). They’ve hosted artists including Stephen Akpo and Phil Hale, creators who also focus overtly on the physical and figurative. Lemonier’s paintings elevate an already impressive and interdisciplinary roster defined by an anti-stasis of movement and boundaries: “I’m permanently putting my work straight to canvas,” he explains. “There are sometimes moments of reflection in between, but I’m always looking to see where things will take me next.”
Arthur Lemonier: Of this elusive, I’m an accomplice runs from Tue, 3 Dec 2024 to the Thu, 19 Dec 2024 at The Art Office, 48 Chalcot Rd, London NW1 8LS.
Victoria Comstock-Kershaw is a London-based critic, editor and contemporary arts writer.
