Portofolio "La nature prie sans parole" Planche 10

Lebadang, né en 1921 à Vietnam ou Việt Nam, décédé en 2015 à Paris

Lebadang was born in 1921 in Vietnam in Quảng Trị Province, 50 km from Hue, into a family of wealthy landowners. In 1939, at the age of 18, he left to seek his fortune in France. He enlisted with the French army, then enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts de Toulouse, while working for a printer, which was perhaps where he developed an interest in lithography and techniques for multiple reproduction of works. In 1948 he settled in Paris, where he moved in artistic circles. His early works are in a fairly conventional and figurative style, which shifted slowly towards abstraction.
In 1967, he produced a portfolio of 17 prints in Paris entitled La Nature prie sans parole (Nature Prays Without Words). In it he included a meditation on this title, his interpretation of the ideas of Daodejing (道德經) or "The Book of the Way and Its Virtue", written circa 600 BC by Laozi, the father of Daoism. In his abstract compositions, Lebadang creates the suggestion of forms and textures that we fleetingly recognise. He saw in abstraction, in the play of textures and luminous empty spaces in the backgrounds, as evoking the original whole of Daoist philosophy. The forms can be perceived as words that enable us to discern and to apprehend reality. But in using words to discern things, human beings detach themselves from the original unity and from their fundamental nature. Lebadang invites the viewer to reconnect with it through the contemplation of abstract backgrounds from which indeterminate forms emerge.