Paris Photo

For its second appearance at Paris Photo, Intervalle is presenting, in the Curiosa section (booth SC16), Lucas Leffler’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, dedicated to Zilverbeek. This presentation marks a new phase in the collaboration between the artist and Intervalle, following their first exhibition together at Art Paris in 2020.

Born in 1993 and based in Brussels, Lucas Leffler has developed an experimental practice rooted in the chemical materiality and almost alchemical properties of photography. Trained in Brussels and later at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, he has gradually expanded his work to include sculpture and installation. He is interested in the narratives, discoveries, and processes that have shaped the development of photography, which he reimagines through hands-on experiments. His work has been exhibited at the FOMU in Antwerp, the Musée de l’Élysée in Lausanne, the Hangar Photo Art Center in Brussels, as well as at Art Paris and Approche.

Zilverbeek takes its cue from a surprising episode in Antwerp’s industrial history. In the 1930s, two workers at the Agfa factory attempted to recover the silver contained in the sludge of a river contaminated by the factory’s wastewater. Nearly a century later, Leffler takes up this quest of his own: he collects sediment from the river, brings it back to his studio, and spends several months experimenting to create his own photographic emulsion from the silver salts it contains. He then produces prints of the river and the industrial site using this material he has extracted himself.

What was once waste thus becomes the raw material of the image. At once a chemical experiment, an investigation, and an artistic act, Zilverbeek transforms industrial residue into photographic material and turns the creation of the image into a truly physical quest. Leffler does not merely represent photography: he rediscovers its components, manipulates them, and reinvents them.