Perrotin Paris introduces Focus, a new initiative dedicated to special projects and thematic presentations. Located in the gallery at 2bis avenue Matignon, Focus offers an intimate setting for artists to explore short, experimental, or deeply personal narratives. Audiences can engage with curated projects that highlight a unique aspect of an artist's practice beyond larger exhibitions. The inaugural Focus exhibition is a poetic series by Lionel Estève entitled Un Hiver à Athènes (A Winter in Athens). Using delicate embroidery on pieces of white silk, the artist documents his wanderings through Athens, capturing fleeting impressions of the city's landscapes, textures, and rhythms.

Hazard or chance? Definitely something uncertain and random. It took a series of fortuitous events and a little hope to get here. We're not talking about major events. As so often, it's about converging clusters of ideas and desires.

I had a large scrap of natural silk organza left over at the studio from a previous project. Its lightness, suppleness, and transparency were attractive, and I hoped it might become the beginning of something. It was an intuition, like so many others while you're working. So I asked Hossein, my tailor neighbor, to make some kind of prototype, like a silk scarf.

I was amazed at the delicacy of what he came up with. It was a small transparent scarf, more or less rectangular, hemmed at the edges, a little wavy, a sort of lazy line. It wasn't clumsy, either. Nothing was faked or contrived. This single piece of silk seemed to convey so much softness and finesse, like something perfect waiting for a gesture.

The challenge was to make that gesture without upsetting the balance or weighing anything down to maintain the initial sensitivity. I almost had to be discreet. I decided to lay some colored thread over it, letting it run, just pricking it from time to time to attach it. This process seemed both sufficient and just.

I was also attracted by the idea of producing a work that could be part of everyday life and travel with me. I could afford to travel while working, escaping the dreary Brussels winter. A friend let me stay in an apartment in Athens with a lovely view and a small table where I could do my embroidery. I took many "scarves" with me, like so many blank pages.

I arrived in Athens without a plan, only the intuition that this project would be suited to the trip. Stimulated by the city, its abundance, gentleness, and all its paradoxes, I decided to document my wanderings as if I were keeping a diary, without premeditation, day by day, each page standing on its own. My intention was not to produce a tourist guide or an account of Athens but rather to bear witness to what I saw. I let myself be inspired by the softness of the Mediterranean light and what it touched. In other words, I embroidered a few ruins, small abstract landscapes, a backgammon board, police buses, fences... and also friezes, with motifs arranged and repeated ad infinitum like the illustration of a mathematical sequence; all these things followed one another as if on a journey.

I wanted my work to be truly connected to that time and place. This was reinforced when I came across some dresses and vests embroidered with traditional Northern Greek motifs in a second-hand store. The similarity of the motifs, the colors, and the techniques seemed to confirm my intentions. It made me think of Béla Bartók composing his six Romanian dances. Like him, I had repurposed all this traditional and folkloric material. I had also reinterpreted the light and the urban energy. This made me feel close to him.

Text by Lionel Estève