Paris Photo

For its 2nd participation in Paris Photo, Intervalle presents a personal exhibition by Lucas Leffler entitled Zilverbeek in the sceteur Curiosa, Stand SC16. Lucas Leffler (1993) lives and works in Brussels. He studied photography at the HELB vocational high school in Brussels and completed the master's program (Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium).
His work is stimulated by a fascination for the materiality of chemistry and its bivalent character, between the scientific and the magical dimension. He has an experimental practice of the photographic medium. Lucas Leffler tends to broaden his practice to other forms (sculpture, installation). He is inspired by myths and facts often linked to photography to reconstruct his history and create new ones.
His work has been exhibited at FOMU, the Musée de la Photographie in Antwerp in 2021, at the Musée Elysée (Lausanne, CH) in 2020, at the Hangar Photo Art Center (Brussels, BE) in 2021, at the Approche fair (Paris, FR ) in 2021, at the Art Paris fair in 2020 and 2021 and at the Biennale Image tangible (Paris, FR) in 2020. His first book Zilverbeek (Silver Creek) was released in 2019 with at The Eriskay Connection.
Through his mud prints, Lucas Leffler is inspired by the alchemical nature of the photographic medium, between magic and science. One day, while still a student at the Beaux Arts, he came across a press article which recounts an incredible adventure. Two workers who work at Agfa, a brand that produces photographic films, decide to recover from the mud of the river soiled by polluting discharges from their ex-factory, the silver salts which go into the manufacture of photo paper. It is the money that obviously interests them but the content is far too low to make a fortune. Hope disappointed. Eighty years later, Lucas Leffler, fascinated by this story, takes his shovel and his bucket. He brought back liters of mud from the ?Silver Creek? to his studio and, after months of testing, produced his own photographic mud emulsion. These silver prints with mud, shots of the river and the industrial site, are at the same time a photographic experiment, an artistic performance and the quest for a Grail.