Thomas Lévy-Lasne

THOMAS LÉVY-LASNE:

I grew up in the Marais near the Place des Vosges and I think that the beauty of those places really made an impression on me. It’s a privilege that I became aware of much later. My father worked in documentaries and television; my mother was a history teacher. There’s a quote from David Hockney that I like a lot: “Why did you stop drawing?” Because all children draw and some of them don’t stop. I always drew a lot as a child and, for family reasons, I liked shutting myself away in my bedroom. I’ve interviewed a lot of artists [for my programme Les apparences on Twitch and YouTube] and what we have in common is embracing solitude in a way not many people can. My childhood didn’t feel protected; I knew that the world was a cold, icy chaos.

THOMAS LÉVY-LASNE:

I started at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris at the age of 17 and was told that painting was complicated. From 1986 to 2018, people thought painting was dead. Video and installation art were upcoming and photography was in vogue. I had nothing against that; I discovered galleries at the age of 13 and loved Christian Boltanski and Daniel Spoerri. What was influential for me was seeing Lucian Freud’s exhibition at Tate Britain in 2002. At the time, I was working with a French art critic, Hector Obalk, filming museums in Europe, and Lucian Freud’s show shook me to the core. I realised that it was possible to make big, important paintings.

THOMAS LÉVY-LASNE:

Making something simple in painting is very difficult. What interested me was being in continuity with the history of art, rather than creating something new, and looking at very contemporary things. For example, painting a cow with a number on its ears is about playing with the animal’s condition of being sent to the abattoir, which isn’t far from the Jewish condition of the 1940s. 

I introduced modern technology in my paintings, like mobile phones and webcams. I took The Toilet of Venus by Velázquez and tried to paint a contemporary woman, not in an idealised way, but with beauty spots and imperfect proportions, looking at a social network on her computer. I made Laetitia au lit in 2012; I was trying to create a new archetype of our era. Then during Covid, I made drawings of people on Skype that captured the moment when people started working from home and using Zoom.

THOMAS LÉVY-LASNE:

They’re always people that I know well. What’s funny is that they’ve all become famous. My painting Vertige (2016) depicts [writer-director] Justine Triet who won an Oscar [for best original screenplay] for Anatomy of a Fall. She’s been my best friend for 20 years and wrote the preface of my book. She is also portrayed in Devant l’arbre (2020), along with her partner Arthur Harari; I photoshopped a picture of a group of tourists and then asked my friends to pose for me. I also included the writer Miguel Bonnefoy who won the Prix Médicis last year [for Le Rêve du jaguar]. A painting like this takes around four months to create, so I really need to want to do it! I have an “atlas” of 50,000 photos, classified according to dates.

THOMAS LÉVY-LASNE:

I was a simple, traditional painter, depicting reality – birth, death, love, tenderness, the relationship with technology. And I could no longer pretend that it was normal to be painting what was gradually disappearing because of climate change. An example is Bord de mer, commissioned by the Centre Pompidou for [the moving image festival] Hors Piste in 2017. The institution asked me to paint the sea and I depicted sand dunes covered with oil and plastic debris. Another example is Le Bosco (2020), a huge drawing of a grove at the Villa Médicis in Rome. During my residency there, in 2018-2019, 15 trees fell down because the wind was blowing too strongly due to climate change. I found out that this forest was going to be destroyed and when I returned to Rome two weeks ago, it no longer existed. Last year, I painted a Belgian beach, La plage d’Ostende, where Marvin Gaye wrote Sexual Healing, and depicted the ugly buildings from the 1970s along the coastline and the construction works underway despite the rising sea level. I also painted a romantic sunset in Hyères, La plage d’Hyères, and instead of including a human being, I inserted a rubbish bin that’s positioned in front of the sea.

THOMAS LÉVY-LASNE:

They’re small, helpful plants that grow on stones and freshen the air during heatwaves. In order to live, they need water, nutrients and pollen. I wanted to look at things from the plant’s perspective, externalising myself as a human being.

THOMAS LÉVY-LASNE:

I’m happy that this book is finally released, because everybody can see that I try to paint everyone. Now, I’d like to be able to paint everything. In an exhibition, variety is important and I like to mix everything up. There are lots of articles about painting coming back in vogue; I’ve been talking about that for 20 years!

THOMAS LÉVY-LASNE:

I’ve been commissioned by the Centre Pompidou-Metz to make a copy of a painting in the Louvre, the Portrait de Monsieur Bertin by Ingres. He looks very proud of himself and I thought it was funny to add a young black woman in front of the painting made by him.

THOMAS LÉVY-LASNE:

My studio is in the Saint-Ouen flea market. It’s always empty apart from the painting that I’m working on. I like it that way because I need to fill the room with the painting. I tend to work on one painting at a time, 16 hours a day, from 2pm until 6am. I also have a monk’s room and another room filled with all my books and objects.

THOMAS LÉVY-LASNE:

My ambition is for institutions to display contemporary paintings of French or international artists, because we usually don’t see those in museums. Of course, we can argue that there’s David Hockney [at Fondation Louis Vuitton], but we’re always seeing David Hockney. People ask me how I consider my future as an artist, if I’d like to see my work on display at the Centre Pompidou. But for now, there are artists that I admire, that are older than me, who aren’t exhibited there; I’m thinking of Françoise Petrovitch or Philippe Cognée. First, I’m pushing for the older generation to be exhibited in these institutions; then, it’ll be my turn.