Finesse and delicacy are what characterize best Antonin Anzil’s artistic practice. Paper as a medium seems incompatible with the idea of engraving or sculpturing; and yet. Using a sharp tool to carefully push the paper, the artist painstakingly gives birth to three-dimensional relief that make abstract forms and patterns magically appear. His engraved drawings are both poetic and tangible, and one would almost like to caress with their fingertips these intricate laces. While some of his works are influenced by his studies at the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris, echoing patterns of textile or tapestry motifs, other drawings send us back to interior landscapes, invented maps or topographic aerial views of territories. From the infinitely large to the infinitely small, these maps of the world become an oscillating motive between abstract and figurative, phantasmagorical landscapes and utopian cartographies. What ultimately transpires is an invitation to travel and get lost in our own imaginary world.

Antonin Anzil’s paper reliefs materialize Aeolian processes of carving and crafting both through movement and through topographies in landscapes. Winds imprint rhythms to these works, through surges of energy in Aestus and in Grand Cercle, and through contours and reliefs in Subak and Territoire. Anzil’s works thus both express the elemental characteristics of winds - energy, force, movement, fluidity, transformation - and their materiality as geological agents forming erosion cuts, valleys, and gurneys. These works bring to mind two disparate relations with winds, one of disorientation by violent wind phenomena (Heaven’s Breath; 59-72); and the other the creation of order and measurement of wind’s energy, here in the imagined topographies seen from above. On one hand the excess, the energy, movement, and eruption of Aestus and Grand Cercle, on the other the clear geometric structures of Subak and Territoire. These territories are aerial views conveying quietness and horizontality. Triptyque Noir et Blanc relates the elemental and the material by bringing rhythms and movement to the aerial and the geological in an interrelation between both.

- The Editors

Antonin Anzil graduated from the École européenne supérieure de l’image de Poitiers in 2010, and from the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Paris in 2012. He then worked with the Studio de Création de Maison Francis Kurkdjian until 2017 when he opened his own professional studio.