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Sébastien Léon’s Material Exploration

"What interests me is how far I can push those behaviors until the material starts to contradict itself: resin that reads like leather, mirrors that dissolve into transparency, wool rugs that feel like hairy terrains."

Sébastien Léon doesn’t think in categories, nor does he fit into them. He’s a multi-hyphenate creator whose practice takes mediums, materials and forms at their most familiar and finds in them something fundamentally other. “Each creation operates as an act of revelation: an object that reveals itself through transformation,” reads his bio, and in his hands, resin might become leather or stone and glass can metamorphasize into fog or folds of cloth or lava. So, too, has the French-born, New York-based artist transformed himself, from creative director to designer and artist. He is variously described as a sculptor, a musician, a furniture designer and an installation artist.

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Léon first experimented with blown glass in 2019 when working on a collection of lighting shown at Design Miami, and he describes the medium as one of transmutation—sand mutated by fire, then shaped by air into something solid. That arc, from one state of matter to another, is a useful description of his general approach to his work, which encompasses not only physical objects but also soundworks. He has collaborated on projects with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, released three solo records, built a permanent sonic sculpture for the Orange County Museum of Art and created immersive sound environments around the world.

(Later this month, he’ll be debuting a new soundwork........

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