Early in his career, Lionel Sabatt\u00e9 came to be known for his sculptures made of dust clusters. These initially took the form of wolves, then unicorns, goats, and a wide array of birds. Beyond the impact of his artworks, Sabatt\u00e9 invites us as viewers to question our attitudes toward art materials of the humbler variety, such as those resulting from decomposition and deterioration. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dust is often overlooked, and is seen as being a fragile type of matter belonging to the world of waste. Sabatt\u00e9, however, transmutes it into an art material in its own right, a material that can give body to artworks of singular beauty and astonishing longevity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sabatt\u00e9 also often uses dust as medium for his works on paper. Once it is glued to paper, he can trace the lines of a face into it, in his rare forays into representations of the human face. These countenances appear furtively; as apparitions, they question the boundaries between that which is, that which is not, and that which is no longer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More recently, Sabatt\u00e9 has used photography to doubly consolidate the traces he works with: through the choice of subject, and also via his use of pigments, which both reveal and carry the memory of what is being depicted. Sabatt\u00e9 calls this method \u201cdustography\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200aphotographs created through a process involving the affixation of dust to a canvas surface. Here, the memory of natural landscapes is rendered both via the image itself and by the physical experience of the sites portrayed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In his practice, Sabatt\u00e9 centres the visible, the apparent. Decomposition and deterioration, once mastered through the magic of art-making, can become a source of life and renewal. Art reverses the effects of time, and nothing enables us to bear witness to this process more strikingly than deteriorating matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Translated by Simon Brown<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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