At Galerie Templon in Paris Chef Menteur, on view from January 10 to March 14, 2026, marks the first solo presentation of French artist Léonard Martin in the gallery’s Paris programme. Born in Paris in 1991 and educated at the Beaux-Arts and Le Fresnoy, Martin brings to this exhibition the outcome of his Villa Albertine residency in New Orleans, a period that has profoundly shaped his visual language and subject matter. The exhibition’s title, borrowed from a Louisiana highway, alludes to the uncertain boundary between appearance and truth, a theme running throughout the works on display. Martin’s narrative focus is on the New Orleans Carnival, a site of stark contrasts where burlesque brushes with tragedy and where social, identity and ecological tensions come to the fore. Within this festive yet dissonant context, the artist collects and incorporates fragments of objects and debris into his painterly practice, using them as symbols of a saturated and shifting world.The works on show feature fragmentary imagery, visual sequences and compositions that seem plucked from a mental film; Martin employs montage techniques drawn from cinema and literature, such as cut-up and stop-motion, to create canvases in which each element operates as narrative and social parody. The inclusion of a sculpture alongside the paintings broadens the formal inquiry, dissolving hierarchies between image and object. Overall Chef Menteur invites reflection on the boundaries between reality and fiction, between collective memory and individual narrative, positioning Martin’s work within the contemporary dialogue on visual identity and the human condition.
