Lonnie Holley at Labanque

Déplier les mondes, Béthune, France 

“It was in January 1912 that powerful spirits came to me, commanding me to draw and paint, something I had never done before”. Augustin Lesage (1876-1954), a miner since the age of fourteen, was underground when he heard this voice speaking to his ears. From there began a long career as an artist. In his paintings, uniquely and meticulously composed, dense, multicolored architectural worlds unfold. Imbued with a powerful syncretism, his works read like cascades: upon looking, the viewer is transported into a second, deeper plane, buried within the first; complex systems that multiply ad infinitum.

This is the starting point of Déplier les mondes. Spread across three floors, the exhibition explores the physical, symbolic and spiritual possibilities of parallel universes, the fruit of mining, ore and hollow earth; superimposed space-times, as if the universe was folded onto itself, like a thin layer of paper. Stemming from a journey through the painting practice of Lesage, the exhibition invites visitors into these tunnels of ink and coal mirroring our world; universes within universes, like a B side to the disc.

Dancing on the border between collective mythologies, theories of an alternative world and scientific fictions, Déplier les mondes addresses contemporary issues of mining, the voice of resistant lands and the sonic vibrations of matter. How to consider inhabited subterranean worlds, the idea of ultra-terrestrial life and indecipherable languages? The exhibition invites us to think further, and creates a choreography in which works created outside the art world, spiritualism and contemporary forms meet without hierarchy - where the real and the inexplicable converse.

Lonnie Holley, The Rags of the Chosen People, 2025. Rope, wood, plastic, cloth, copper, electrical and steel wire; 75 x 70 x 40 cm, 29 1/2 x 27 1/2 x 15 3/4 in. © Lonnie Holley. Courtesy the artist and Edel Assanti.