Lea DUMAYET

Born in 1990 in Paris, Léa Dumayet has developed a sculptural approach that evokes the spirit of the Arte Povera artists. Drawing on the formal repertoire offered by nature, she also reimagines the everyday by appropriating contemporary materials—sometimes weathered—through which she reveals their beauty and hidden strengths. Guided by an understanding of the material, the artist focuses on playing with its intrinsic properties, such as movement and stillness, fragility and strength, or lightness and heaviness. While minimal in their materiality, her sculptures and installations nonetheless possess a profoundly poetic quality as well as an inexhaustible potential for existential inquiry—such as the suspension of time, the power of the present moment, the permeability between dream and reality, and the unpredictability of forces beyond our control.

While distinguished from the rest of her body of work by their two-dimensional, strictly metallic aesthetic, her *Souffles* series nevertheless crystallizes the central themes of her practice—precisely through the very process of their creation. Indeed, their creation—using hot wax within a wooden frame—resembles a physically demanding feat of high-wire acrobatics for the artist, who must precisely balance the correct distance, the right force of breath, and a specific wax temperature.

The result is a work whose appeal lies in the spiral of analogies it unfolds and the resulting focus it elicits in the viewer. From the creative breath to the undulating surface, via the seashell, his *Souffles* also evoke Yves Klein’s artistic attemptsto capture the immateriality of existence.