The Gold of Time

Discover a series of new works by Gabriel Leger, created especially for the Villa Kérylos! These artistic proposals come face to face with Théodore Reinach's Hellenic vision .

"When you read a word, how do you give it an age? Gabriel Leger has come up with a personal and unique answer to this question: the word is immortal, it escapes time, and as soon as it is uttered, it regains its incantatory power, its evocative force. It's a power that Gabriel Leger seeks in Latin and Greek, those dead languages that he brings back to life through writing, the guardian of memory and transmitter of secret, mysterious, initiatory knowledge.

Using ancient words, immemorial materials that mankind has used for millennia, and objects that he creates in close symbiosis with sunlight, water and fire, wood and bees, the artist seeks to suspend time or to make it experience its true dimension. Using art and objects to talk about time.

A quest pursued from Homer's Ithaca to the wisdom of the oracles of Dodona, via the Delphic hymns to Apollo, with a stop at Borges. Dazzled by the sensuality of the Argentinian poet and his ability to describe nostalgia, Gabriel Leger docked at the Villa Kérylos. Exile, time, death, the divine and the human: these are the bodies that Gabriel Léger will touch with his art, unveiling them to reveal himself.

The exhibition at Villa Kérylos is his way of reinforcing his love of nature and his admiration for the sacred. He reveals oracles without being burnt. He doesn't promise us immortality by talking about time, but he offers us a bath of meaning and philosophical and aesthetic meditations. Above all, he creates his own oracle. If we cannot conquer time, we can, through art and poetry, extract its gold: the gold of time, as André Breton wrote on his epitaph. Magic words, memorable poems, incorruptible objects, to overcome the darkness of death and bring back to life an ancient past that is still with us, in the symbolic setting of a neo-Greek villa on the shores of the Mediterranean.

Discover the artist's work on his website.

Image: © Gabriel Leger / ADAGP