Guillaume Leblon Helbling

Helbling is Guillaume Leblon’s new monographic catalog. Published by Paraguay Press, the book is the result of a close collaboration with graphic designer Frédéric Teschner and presents the work of Guillaume Leblon in sculpture, installation and drawing over the last four years, with a particular focus on the most recent developments in his practice.

The book is structured around four recent monographic exhibitions in which Leblon was able to exercise the creativity and formal rigor characterizing his work since the early 2000s: « Augmentation and Dispersion » (Culturgest, Porto, 2008); « Site of Confluence » (Mudam, Luxembourg, 2009); « Someone Knows Better than Me » (Grand Café, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Saint-Nazaire, 2010); and « Black Apple Falls » (Fondation d’entreprise Ricard, Paris, 2012).

Helbling features three texts-by French art critic Hélène Meisel, American artist and exhibition curator Michelle Grabner and British graphic designer and publisher Stuart Bailey, respectively. Each of them relies on very different registers of writing and analysis to apprehend Leblon’s work, thereby emphasizing one of its greatest qualities, its capacity to resist ad hoc facile explanations and guarantee one thing, in the end: no single mode of writing on his work is closer to the pieces than another, and none can claim to be more « accurate » than others.

This fundamental aspect of Leblon’s work will again be foregrounded on April 8 for the first public presentation of the book at the Fondation d’entreprise Ricard-in the form of a concert of the band France Frites, who are to perform the catalog in the manner of a score.

France Frites is a band of young artists established in Bordeaux and Brussels. Their musical influences come from the history of rock music as much as contemporary art, while concerts borrow more from the installation and the happening than the classic codes of rock concerts.