COMPLETE ARTISTIC FILE
Lost-It
"Rewriting The Myth of Sisyphus on 12,000 painted Post-It notes, where each autonomous and unfinished canvas replays the Camusian absurd: creating endlessly knowing that accomplishment will remain impossible."
Painting Albert Camus's The Myth of Sisyphus from sticky notes. Rewriting the essay on the absurd in the form of Post-It notes, like so many tasks to be accomplished. Each crumpled fragment becomes a sign of forgetfulness and self-denial.
Each reminder corresponds to a painting. Approximately 12,000 canvases were completed, representing nearly a century of work. The entire work can never be completed: the very creation of the work thus replays the condition of Sisyphus.
Each painting, autonomous and incomplete, contains within itself the entire book, amputated of its words. The entire series becomes a mise en abyme: the artistic life devoted to it illustrates the Camusian absurd, endlessly repeating the act of creating, knowing that accomplishment will remain elusive.
LIbrE
“Freedom is being able to defend what I don't believe, even in a regime or a world that I approve of. It is being able to prove my opponent right.” Albert Camus.
LIbrE is an enactment of the Camusian principle: freedom does not reside in self-affirmation but in the capacity to welcome the reason of the other. The device—the public freely tattoos the artist's body—transforms the dialogue into a physical experience: the spectator becomes the author of an irreversible trace, and the artist, the medium and witness of a discourse he no longer controls.
This reversal of the relationship between transmitter and receiver materializes democracy as an embodied tension: freedom is experienced in the consented confrontation with otherness. The body, traversed by individual truths, becomes a collective archive, a mirror of plural thought.
By extending the logic of previous participatory series (AVEC, JE SUIS UNE PUTE, GRAFF), LIbrE radicalizes the question of commitment: the artist's body replaces the canvas as a space for co-writing. The performance establishes an ethic of risk and porosity: making oneself vulnerable to the other to experience the meaning of freedom.
O Μινώταυρος
"I question, through the myth of the Minotaur, our capacity to pacify our animal side and to rediscover a temperance lost in the labyrinth of human barbarism and the absurdity of life." (two-part series)
Autophagy? (2023-2024) features a Minotaur dressed in blue, a figure of animality and inner darkness. Sébastien Layral twists the myth into a metaphor for our own labyrinths and the political, social, and ecological impasses of our time.
imMORtALE? (2024-2025) is born from the death of Elena D'Alessandro Layral, integrated into the work by her image and even her funeral ashes. Transformed into a Minotaur, she forms with the artist a hybrid couple where love and mourning merge, where loss becomes a creative force. The whole affirms that the Minotaur is not an external monster, but the intimate part of the human that we must learn to look at in order to find balance in imbalance.
