Antoine Langenieux-Villard. Viento a favor – EN

Antoine Langenieux-Villard

Viento a favor

5th November 2026 – 15th January 2027

There is something aerial about Antoine Langenieux-Villard’s paintings. Forms unfold, intertwine and fold back on themselves like sails caught in the wind. The surfaces stretch, hollow out and rise, lending the canvas an almost organic sense of movement. Everything seems animated by an invisible force, as though the painting were constantly seeking a new balance between tension and release.

Yet everything takes place at ground level, within the studio space. Freed from its stretcher, the canvas is folded, immersed in baths of colour, left to dry and then worked with abrasive paper. The artist intervenes less through addition than through subtraction: he wears away and carves into the surface, bringing out lines, layers and traces of earlier gestures. Like a sculptor, he reveals the material by removing its layers. Painting thus emerges from a paradoxical process in which the destruction of the surface becomes a condition of its appearance.

This process of abrasion establishes a physical relationship with the canvas, whose resistance partly determines the course of the work. As the material deteriorates, it calls for gestures of repair. Through stitching and collage, the artist reworks the surface in a practice that finds one of its echoes in boro, the Japanese textile tradition based on the patching and reuse of worn fabrics. On the reverse, bandages made from canvas offcuts support the weakened areas. The alterations remain visible, integrated into a surface that now preserves the history of its own transformations. Chance, wear and the passage of time thus become compositional forces in their own right.

In the Recto Verso series, by folding the canvas back onto itself, Antoine Langenieux-Villard reveals its reverse side. The painting ceases to be a unified surface and becomes a volume, its different faces disappearing from view and recomposing themselves through the folds. The front and back are no longer opposed as the two distinct sides of a single support: they intermingle, extend into one another and blur the boundaries of the visible. What was hidden rises to the surface, while what once seemed self-evident becomes fragmented. The canvas then becomes a space between appearance and concealment, where traces of past work remain present without ever fully revealing themselves.

Like sails, these canvases take shape through contact with forces that pass through and deform them. Their movement is not merely a visual illusion: it is inscribed in the very material, in the folds that constrain it, the abrasions that thin it and the repairs that hold it together. Painting thus exists in a state of unstable equilibrium between what resists and what gives way.

The title Viento a favor (A Fair Wind) evokes a way of moving forward with the forces at play, rather than attempting to master the unpredictable. Like a sail finding its course in the wind, the canvas takes shape through tensions, accidents and acts of repair. It conceals neither its flaws nor the gestures that have transformed it; instead, it makes them the very conditions of a renewed presence. Between resistance and surrender, fragility and momentum, Antoine Langenieux-Villard’s paintings continue their own voyage, in search of a course that is forever unexpected.

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