Paul Lepetit is a young artist who graduated from the Ecole Supérieur d'Arts et Médias de Caen/Cherbourg in 2019. After his studies, he leaves for Paris to join the ARCA programme at DOC! where he will benefit from a workshop and an accompanying grant from September 2019 to December 2020. This research and artistic creation workshop will end with a group exhibition: Stone in focus. At the same time, the artist continues, with the OK collective (of which he is a founding member), to organise residencies and exhibitions for young graduate artists. It was also at this time that Paul Lepetit created, with Lina Hentgen, La Pâte, a weekly music programme on radio DUUU*, where the creative process is highlighted and how the artist (visual artist) develops his universe through the medium of sound.
In 2021, he obtained a production residency with Societies (a not-for-profit structure for new relations between art and society). This allowed him to benefit, for one year, from a workshop in a low-cost housing estate in Montreuil, from permanent supervision by two exhibition curators, and to carry out two commissions for the social landlord Action Logement. Within the framework of this residence, he initiates collective events where several disciplines interact (buffet-perfomance, exhibitions, etc.).
"It is because the works cover several realities, that they cover statuses yet to be defined or refuse to do so, willingly casting doubt on the imaginary and the initial representations of the object, to become autonomous and distance themselves from an already established utility, alluding to it surreptitiously by a gesture that sends them towards the abstraction of their sign.
As in Paul Lepetit's sculptures, which are tinged with absurdity; figures, furniture, abstract sculptures, this time the drawing has wandered, guided by the gesture. The artist's "hesitating figures", with their seductive and manufactured appearance, seem to state a function that has failed. Their poetic bodies and constrained postures leave them suspended in a narrative whose history is unknown. By maintaining doubt as to whether they are objects or sculptures, they cultivate an imbalance that pushes back the explicit to become entangled in our own reveries. Gently incoherent, they exist almost by aberration as potentialities in the imaginary space of our behaviours."
- Fiona Villmer for the magazine Insert n°0