Both Sides Now – Alexandra Leykauf; La tela, il legno, le pareti, i colori – Caroline Reveillaud

For its first show of the new fall season, la villa du Parc has invited the artist alexandra leykauf (dE, 1976), who has put together an on-sight tour of her recent work on the landscape. appropriating some of the depictions that have fashioned the modern view of nature, leykauf plumbs their visual and cultural depths by manipulating them through various reproduction processes and plays on scale and texture. cheerfully and eagerly drawing on art history, especially the paintings hanging on the walls of the world’s greatest museums, she projects herself and incorporates her image in them through the prism of tangible elements of what she sees daily – her worktable, studio, Smartphone, etc.

For her show at la villa du Parc, leykauf offers visitors a number of pieces based on trompe-l’oeil and the kaleidoscope, especially after paintings treating
the landscape of lake geneva (crespy le Prince, hodler, corot, etc.). She is likewise exhibiting a complete series of her Faces. These are pareidolias with a hidden animality; they surface unconsciously in the harmonious canonical landscapes of art history.

in this way, the artist shifts and upends the explicit and implicit conventions of the (male) gaze, which fashioned landscapes in the past and continues to shape them today, from the window to the screen and from classical perspective to the satellite camera, returning to her eye and ours an active critical position while renewing esthetic wonder.

Summa IOS features a series of landscapes in italy and elsewhere that we roam over in the course of the film (mountains, hills, cliffs, and coasts alternate while underscoring camera movements – focusing, zoom, tracking shot, etc.). a woman shares in voice over thoughts about the historical construction of landscapes as an object of esthetic emotion and philosophical representation of the world.

Image credits: Aurélien Mole