Ce qui reste. Lionel Sabatté

Lionel Sabatté takes over the entire Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature with a monographic exhibition bringing together paintings, drawings, sculptures, and tapestries, including a majority of never-before-seen works.

Matter that carries the memory of life

Dust, rust, wool, nails, dead skin, cement: Lionel Sabatté works with materials situated on the fringes of life and waste. In his hands, these residues become the site of permanent transformation, blurring the boundaries between animal, plant, and human kingdoms. At the heart of his work, oxidation, the reaction of iron and oxygen, gives rise to compositions where rust and pigments become the visible traces of matter in perpetual change.

Rewilding the gaze

Deer, wolves, wild boars, bears, dogs, birds: the museum's most emblematic figures traverse the exhibition, but never in their expected form. The dog reverts to a wolf, sheep transform into wild creatures, birds become landscapes. Between construction and ruin, power and fragility, these figures question loss and alteration as necessities of life rather than as threats.

A journey throughout the museum

The exhibition opens in the courtyard with Mort fertile, a monumental bronze sculpture depicting a stag whose antlers plunge into the earth, an image of loss that becomes a promise of rebirth. The journey then unfolds through the temporary exhibition hall and into the permanent collection rooms.