Close to the Night

INSTALLATION VIEW “Close to the Night“, 2025. Courtesy of the Artist and Sultana.

 

Stepping into a painting by Louis Le Kim, one is never certain of finding a way back out. The maze is complex, lit by shifting lights, and opens onto an infinity of passages.

Trained at the Villa Arson and the Beaux-Arts de Paris, his line gives form to a dystopian imaginary and to distant landscapes one might dream of discovering behind a door left forever closed. In these abandoned fragments, emptied of human presence, he finds a symbolic force where the archetype of the cave—both a place of withdrawal and revelation—intersects with metaphysical panoramas suspended between dream and silence.

Drawing on traces of history, war, and time, Le Kim transcends them, pushing perception to its limits through unsettling perspectives. At Galerie Sultana, his large-scale works reach up to three meters, offering ultra-detailed horizons that verge on the prophetic: scenes where we no longer belong, sometimes illuminated by a fire that seems to call for help, or by a faint halo on the verge of vanishing. Yet at the heart of this darkness, there is always an opening—tiny, distant, discreet. A final spark, fragile but insistent, that threads his canvases with a paradoxical optimism.

These precise works recall both Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons—labyrinths where space itself becomes vertigo—and the deserted architectures photographed by Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, where each concrete structure preserves the memory of a fallen regime. From such echoes arises an open-ended experience, where the viewer drifts, drawn by the intuition of a still unexplored path. His small wooden panels suggest another kind of escape: suspended rectangles, entirely abstract, hovering in weightlessness.

In the Bypass video series, the image does not simply depict—it falters, gasps, seeps through. The explorer’s footsteps strike against metal, scrape dust, resound like a body on alert. The expedition unfolds without music, paced only by the rustle of fabric, the breath, the muffled thuds.

Filming becomes a physical crossing, a state of imbalance where each threshold entails risk. Walls are no longer boundaries but resistances to confront. More symbolic than documentary, Le Kim’s moving images closely echo his paintings: they render tangible a collapse that is not hypothetical but already underway.

Whatever the scale or medium, the strength of Le Kim’s practice lies in the vastness of the imaginary it projects. To walk through one of his fictional architectures is to lose oneself with exhilaration in a world at once inhospitable and strangely seductive—a desolate ruin still pierced by a glimmer. It is to seek out the dead ends of vision, to take detours, to remain blocked—and to savor it.

 

Pierre-Antoine Lalande

 

INSTALLATION VIEW “Close to the Night“, 2025. Courtesy of the Artist and Sultana.

INSTALLATION VIEW “Close to the Night“, 2025. Courtesy of the Artist and Sultana.

 

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