So if we stick with things themselves, we might say Guillaume Leblon’s works are more often than not precise conceptual constructions which bring about poetic representations. His sculptures use immediately recognizable shapes or elements – a bench, a wall, a ladder, a deckchair, a stairway or stairs, a hoarding, a tree, a well, a chest or windmills, etc… In this way they show very clear images but without necessarily being easy to grasp. This contradictory experience results from the way in which Leblon introduces elements for each of his works, subtly affecting the familiarity we think we have with these objects. When he plays with the materials, the finishing, the size or the positioning of the works within the exhibition space, he upsets established relationships – that is to say historically, culturally and socially constructed – between the exceptional and the normal, the manufactured and the existent, the personal and impersonal, the ephemeral and the permanent, the old and the new, the dead and the alive… 

  Henceforth, Guillaume Leblon’s exhibitions become the sites of unprecedented articulations of objects, often heterogeneous but always compatible, sites with well-balanced dynamics, temporary and successive, somewhere between what is almost known and the barely known. They sketch unusual landscapes of objects and shapes where the temporalities clash, the past like the future plunging explicitly into our present.  

More especially, these landscapes put the appearance of the new thing into shape which, as historical discipline well knows, always shows itself more easily than it either says or explains it.

By Thomas Boutoux