I have always liked being surrounded by ancient things, by traces of the past, whether human or not. When I was younger, every fragment held in my hands seemed to contain the entirety of a vanished world, and to hold a mystery that was partly my own.
This familiarity with history and its artefacts has never left me, nor has a deep fascination for the imagination’s ability to transmute reality.

Today, I am still in search of what can bring me into resonance with time. The answer comes through encounters with a material, a sound, a text — something with a history that I can appropriate and reawaken in my own way, in the present.

I work with objects or words. I dust them with pollen or meteorite powder. I cover them with honey, with bitumen. I write them endlessly on lead, on gold. I brewed a beer with ancient Egyptian wheat, which I drank. I repolished a Greek mirror in oxidised bronze, in which I rediscovered my own face. I searched for the name of God on a map of India, and recorded it on magnetic tape.

Crystal or smoke: each idea requires its own realisation. I believe that art is, like poetry,
a spiritual matter. My works are enigmas to be deciphered, closed doors that whisper: “open me.”

Gabriel Leger — April 2026