Steven Le Priol’s work explores the notions of reminiscence, uncertainty and false pretences through works in which the surface of fiction acts as a distorting mirror for reality. By borrowing from various domains without favouring one over the other (scientific diagrams, documentary sources, scholarly forms and vernacular expressions…) and by using a multiplicity of mediums (painting, publishing, volume, text…), he applies himself to building a body of work that grows within a complex webbing of correlations and cross-references. Much like a paper chase, each of Steven Le Priol’s pieces is likely to hold the key to another, according to a strategy built on playfully questioning the mechanisms and frameworks in effect in the visual arts, as well as the notions of author, authenticity and factuality in the uncertain interstice of plausibility, somewhere in between what isn’t perfectly true and what isn’t completely false.
Here Steven Le Priol’s work presents itself according to three major notions, which bleed into one another: History & Geography, Ghosts, and Revenants.
The first of these notions is aware of its polysemous nature, at the intersection of scientific discipline and a narrative that includes notions of Grand History, more personal accounts, and their depictions (maps, flags, texts and notes); while the second can be understood as the manifestation of reminiscences and dread; and the third as the manifestation of something returning that is the same but different.
Steven Le Priol

Translated by Lucy Pons, 2023