‘IT’S A
total labyrinth,’ warns artist Nicolas Lefebvre as he shows visitors round his studios under the eaves of a Haussmann building in Paris’s ninth arrondissement. The building, which has remained in the family since it was built by an ancestor on his mother’s side, a relative of the chemist Gay-Lussac, comprises three structures connected on the top floor by a maze of corridors leading to some ten former servants’ rooms. Nicolas has taken over this attic space, with its fine views over the Parisian rooftops towards the Panthéon in the distance, and now uses it as his office, studio, storeroom and showroom. He sometimes even sleeps here, curling up on a chaise longue. Aged 35 and with a stylish hippy-chic look, he sports a mane of long, artfully straggly hair that frames a luxuriant beard and eyes that twinkle as he explains: ‘Since I couldn’t convert this floor into an open space, because of fire regulations, I decided to keep everything as it was, with its aging paintwork and original tomette floor tiles. Most of the rooms don’t even have electricity; it’s like being in the 19th century. I love that feeling.’ It is hard to find your way about in these endless corridors, full of twists and turns and populated by large enigmatic totems. These assemblages by the artist represent mother-goddesses, symbols of femininity, life and fertility, which have fascinated him and fed into the art he has been making since his mother’s death ten years ago. Whether tiny or monumental, all his goddesses feature a vertical silhouette topped by a circle. It is the shape of an Egyptian cross of life, his favourite symbol, which he also wears as a ring. According to the artist: ‘The circle represents the universal, and the cross, the intersection of worlds.’ Nicolas is keen ‘to celebrate the roots common to us all’ in his mother-goddesses. His process consists of assembling three elements, ‘a trinity of objects’, always old and of all different kinds – minerals, plants, pieces of industrial scrap or precious objects, all from diverse periods and cultures – ‘to open up a dialogue between them’. He does this by assembling disparate items – an old piece of jewellery from Zaire, for instance, with a billiard ball on top of an Art Deco plinth. The result is a new object that looks like it has always existed – and something that will no doubt drive ethnologists of the future crazy. ‘I love to transform objects, do away with their original function and give them another meaning. It is not enough to merely turn something upside-down; you have to put it together with objects from another culture.’ Half shaman, half jack-of-all-trades, this lover of outsider art and Arte Povera also summons up the spirit of Surrealism and Dada in his work – just look at the face he’s arranged on an 18thcentury armchair. Elsewhere, he’s used boxes made in 1853, bought from the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in the Jardin des Plantes (WoI Aug 2016), to frame and display other compositions. ‘At the age of 12 I was already amassing boxes and old objects that I spotted with my grandfather at the Drouot auction house, or in some far-flung corner of the globe with my parents.’ A grad-
uate in art history and a great traveller, he developed his experienced eye by visiting antique dealers Jacques Lacoste, Jacques Delbos and Axel Vervoordt, and auctioneer Jean-Claude Binoche. ‘Before my mother died, I was planning to be more of a collector or broker than an artist, but in the end I integrated into my work all these objects that I’d picked up all over the world.’ Today his creations appear in several collections and have been shown at major expositions, among them the 2017 Art Paris fair at the Grand Palais. He calls his work ‘anthropocene’, and in doing so references art that takes nature as its source of inspiration. He feels close to the ideas of farmer/philosopher Pierre Rabhi, who champions the cause of environmentalism in agriculture, and in whose honour he has just made a giant sculpture. Of the rooms he inhabits in the attic, half are used as storage space for raw materials – hundreds, possibly thousands, of objects for future assemblages. A list of them reads like a simple yet surreal poem: shell, pebble, piece of wood, glass, seed, Napoléon III lamp base, elephant’s shoulder blade, Egyptian pottery, Mayan vase, Burmese drum, Native American headdress, pre-Columbian axe… It is not, however, chaos, with everything stored in an orderly fashion. You might think you were in the storerooms of a colonial museum, or in the home of a particularly tidy dealer of stolen goods, so neat and diverse is the array. ‘Burglars broke down all the doors but they left empty-handed,’ the artist says with a smile. One can easily imagine their disappointment on discovering that the treasures here are the vertebrae of a whale and some rusty spears. The room in which Nicolas transforms these items into artworks has a tiny balcony with just enough room for a tub chair so he can sit in the sunshine. Covered with objects, the wall facing his workbench is a masterpiece in itself: interspersed with a clever arrangement of pliers, hammers, chisels, screwdrivers and other tools are photos of the artist’s daughter and mother. Apart from the small adjoining kitchen, with its blueand-white checked curtains ‘inspired by Madeleine Castaing’s country house’, this is the only room to have a wooden floor and electricity. Further down the corridor, a room with 1950s wallpaper houses pieces awaiting assembly, while a larger one serves as a showroom for imposing totems that surround a Louis-Philippe dressing table decorated with shells. He uses another, entirely unfurnished, space to look at pieces with a bit of perspective. For the last few months, Nicolas has been feeling inspired by obelisks. ‘It might be the male counterpart to the mother-goddess. Perhaps there will be children?’ he muses, laughing. ‘I have a project for an obelisk 20m high, with a round marble plinth, a trunk made from a giant palm and a pyramidion of bronze. I dream of installing it in the gardens of the Villa Medici in Rome. Just imagine!’ he cries, his eyes shining with excitement. ‘It would be the first obelisk made from the trunk of a palm tree!’ $ Nicolas Lefebvre. Visit nicolaslefebvre.fr
This page: the artist in front of his workbench. Opposite, top: Nicolas has taken over the entire top floor of the Hausmannian building and uses its warren of corridors to display and store yet more of his art. On the left, an antique cabinet contains a small sculpture. The black basin in the opposite corner is original, installed in c1880