From “Villa Medici” to confinement at Carrouges
Eschewing purely academic knowledge, Léo Baron performs gestural work that allows him to develop a deep reflection on the traces he leaves alongside printed pages. These have led him for some time already on the path of correspondence between plastic art writing and poetic writing. It all started with a statement by Florence Barthelemy on the painter’s work that triggered “a certain porosity in him”, he explains. Léo Baron had been touched. The man with permeable hands and spirit therefore sought concordances between his universe and that of prose. The result is a conversation where ink strokes and words reveal the continuity of a double assembly. The book thus releases dynamic tensions between the printed words given back their freedom of speech and the infra-verbal traces of the brush. By the signs he activates, the painter gives life to the text, which in turn reveals a plastical significance.
Léo Baron, always on the lookout for new pathways, identified, in dialogue with his companions, an articulation that allows him to work at the borders of the musicality of language and signs. It only takes him a few strokes of ink to remediate the rigidity of the dactylographic formulation by a sense of disorder or another order. We are in the presence of encounters and approaches between two pages that are joined together and yet remain distinct. The blending, without being total, only shows the output released from dialoguing entities. However, the artist has not abandoned painting on chassis and large formats where the colors and graphics continue to correspond by intersecting.
Léo Baron has become a master in hand-to-hand contact; contact of the man with the paint and the graphs sometimes traced using a gardener’s rake, or via a brush calibrated according to the hand which handles it. Master of overlapping spaces that speak a silent language and finally master of the passage from the body of the written text to that of the color drawn by a dancing hand on the paper.
