Artist: Xavier Veilhan

Perrotin New York presents Compass, a solo project by French artist Xavier Veilhan. The works on view focus on the artist’s interest in geometry, including a new series of line drawings, graphic mobiles and a marquetry, as well as a site-specific mural of hand drawn circles on the walls of the gallery.

Over the last three decades, Xavier Veilhan has developed a multi-form approach to sculpture, painting, performance, video, and photography, often generating installations in which the audience becomes an active participant. Known primarily for his figurative sculptures and conceptual paintings, he has developed his own formal vocabulary, reinterpreting classical sculptural and architectural elements under a technological gaze. Utilizing geometrical figures and mathematical designs, the artist conceptualizes the living world through an analytical perspective.

In the exhibition, we are welcomed by the form of Alice n°2, the only marquetry on view. Combining the digital and the material, Veilhan attempts to capture the familiar likeness of the human figure through a modernistic perspective. The structural geometric form poised against a neutral background questions our understanding of classical portraiture, as Alice exists separate from physical representation of the real world.

The core of Compass consists of a series of new drawings in a variety of circular shapes and scales. For years, the artist has utilized drawing as a method for research and communication, which is now at the heart of his practice. In 2020, Veilhan began exploring the possibilities of a single line on paper in his Confinement drawings. These new works will expand his interest beyond the paper, creating an illusion of infinite space.

Hanging from the ceiling, mobiles mimic the geometric motions of his drawings. Shadows of these works dance along the walls, their movement determined by interaction with visitors passing through the space.

Drawn directly on the walls of the space, Veilhan will create a site- specific mural with a large-scale rod compass which the artist produced for the project. Multiple repeated circles frame each two-dimensional line drawing, extending his works on paper into the three-dimensional space of the gallery. Veilhan’s Compass becomes not only a literal tool for drawing circles, but a metaphor for finding one's bearings in space.