LÉA DUMAYET

Revelations, contradictions, joy and balance

Léa Dumayet’s path into art began almost as a childhood revelation. She remembers seeing an exhibition of Alexander Calder as a child and telling her parents that she wanted to do the same.

After high school, she entered the Beaux-Arts de Paris. From there, sculpture became the language that allowed her to fully inhabit space. “Painting felt too flat for me. I needed to take the space. I needed volume, air, architecture.” Alongside sculpture and installation, photography has always remained present in her practice.

Her relationship with form changed profoundly during an exchange in Rio de Janeiro. Until then, her work had been more geometric and restrained. Suddenly, Brazil opened another way of seeing. “I understood that curves and organic shapes could also be part of my work.”

The force of the Brazilian landscape there left a lasting mark. “It was the first time in my life that I felt so small in front of nature.” Rather than representing it directly, she began to observe its structures, its rhythms and its emotional power. Another revelation.

Travel remains essential to her process. Moving from one place to another allows her to collect objects, materials and impressions that later enter the work. Around the age of 27, she became increasingly connected to Italy. A residency at Fonderia Battaglia, in Milan, was especially important, as it was where she created her first bronze pieces. Since then, Léa has lived and worked between Paris and Milan.

This encounter with Italian craftsmanship opened new possibilities in her practice, allowing her to translate fragile, ephemeral gestures into durable materials. Her Milan studio, larger and more central to her current practice, has become a space where she can explore scale, matter and experimentation more freely, while remaining closely connected to a network of artisans and workshops that play a key role in the development of her work.

Air runs through Léa’s work as an invisible force. Her installations seem to float and expand, in dialogue with the surrounding architecture. This idea takes another form in her Souffle series, compact metallic pieces that begin with a breath. “If I blow too early, it splashes. If I blow too late, it stays flat.” The process relies on a delicate balance between liquid and solid, control and accident.

This tension between opposites lies at the heart of Léa’s work. “I am always searching for that balance between fragility and strength, between lightness and heaviness.”

She is equally drawn to the encounter between natural and industrial materials. Wood, stone, branches and found elements appear alongside bronze, brass or aluminum. What interests her is the moment when it becomes difficult to distinguish what comes from nature and what has been transformed. “Together, these materials become something between reality and dream.”

Léa speaks of joy — “the pleasure of making” — as an essential part of her artistic practice. She connects this feeling to the discovery of Calder’s work: that sense of playfulness, like a child exploring equilibrium for the first time.

Ultimately, what remains constant is the search for balance: between the organic and the industrial, the real and the dreamlike, attraction and risk, control and accident. Her works inhabit that suspended moment where everything seems to hold together — just before it might shift, fall or transform.