The Memory of Silt – a tribute to Claude Monet
As a multimedia visual artist, Lionel Sabatté creates a body of work entirely driven by experimentation. Like a true alchemist, he works with both the most refined and the most basic materials in his quest for creations that straddle the line between figuration and abstraction. When he learnt last year that the water lily pond was being dredged, he asked to collect a few buckets of the silt that had accumulated over several decades. Using old photographs of the pond – some dating from the early 1960s and others of the dredged pond – he has created a whole series of images screen-printed onto canvas using transparent ink mixed with the dried silt and other waste materials from his studio. In doing so, the artist allows us to glimpse the memory of the silt whilst composing these images of the water lily pond through the ages. A tribute to the painter of Giverny in this centenary year of his death.
Philippe Piguet,
exhibition curator
