Grand Campagne

After years dedicated to mastering the technique of engraving, towards the mid-80s Lebadang turned his attention to the organic and technical processes involved in the production of support materials such as paper. The 1985 series “Espacios”, marks the definitive phase of Lebadang’s artistic career, the artist begins to merge the Eastern traditions of landscape painting with the scientific images produced by modern-day technologies. These aerial landscapes, as the artist himself likes to call them, recall the dynamic and entrancing topography of his native Vietnam, where highlands, lowlands and coastal plains are covered by forests and rice terrace fields that expand across mountains and hills. In Lebadang’s spatial imaginary converge the topographic map, made in low relief, and microscopic view of cellular units, opening fields of color and abstract shapes in the otherwise monochromatic and bare surface of paper. Lebadang’s aerial views are not determined by an attempt to order physical space, but rather, by a desire to reconfigure space within a cosmic order where every being and phenomena, from the smallest one to the most expansive one, coexist. Through a combination of both textural surfaces and flat images of colorful abstract shapes, the artist shortens the distance between the physical body and the image produced by technologies of vision. Lingering in the threshold between image and tactile writing system, Lebadang's paintings manage to return to the work of art its most ancient value, that of being a universal language that turns our human experience into a knowledge of the world.