For the fifth edition of Tête à tête, Alzueta Gallery Paris brings together the paintings of Aythamy Armas and the bamboo sculptures of Laurent Martin "Lo", on view from September 17 to October 11, 2025. At the core of their encounter lies the balance and expressive power of the line, explored through two complementary ways of inhabiting space.

The line is their common thread. It grounds drawing, traces writing, and opens form. Yet in the work of Aythamy Armas and Laurent Martin "Lo", it transcends this initial role to become an endpoint: a fracture that reveals the depth and texture of space. By making space an active participant, they render it tangible. From the line, both artists pursue an exploration of balance—of forms, tensions, and voids—where the harmony of composition unfolds. Their gestures give rise to light arabesques, suspended in a fragile yet serene alignment. Their work reflects an unceasing quest for perfect balance, for that singular point of tension where strength and delicacy coexist.

In Aythamy Armas’s work, this reflection on balance is transposed into pictorial matter. His canvases emerge from a slow, inward process, where composition becomes a rhythmic, almost musical structure. Armas sculpts the canvas as though it were a three- dimensional space: the variations in line thickness, the intensity of the stroke, create the illusion of a surface that is anything but flat. The void is no longer empty; it becomes an essential actor, a site of passage and circulation. For Armas, painting is not a means of representation but an end in itself, an autonomous language that, through gesture, line, and their variations, opens up spaces in which to exist. His canvases unfold like inner landscapes. This sense of suspension—this dialogue of line, rhythm, and gesture—resonates with the aerial sculptures of Laurent Martin "Lo".

Originally trained in decorative arts in Paris and once a creative director, Laurent Martin "Lo" chose to abandon that path to follow a single intuition: bamboo. What first appeared during travels in Asia soon grew into a lifelong fascination. For more than fifteen years, “Lo” has wandered between India, Indonesia, Costa Rica, and Vietnam, learning from the plant itself—its strength, its flexibility, its quiet wisdom. His sculptures are born from this intimate dialogue: suspended in space, they sketch lines that hover like breaths. Every curve, counterweight, and tension is held in a delicate balance, where fragility becomes strength. Out of these gestures emerges a visual poetry of oscillation and silence. In constant exchange with air, light, and shadow, bamboo reveals its true nature: movement made visible.

Together, the sculptures and canvases trace a shared space to be entered and traversed. Within the gallery, the works do not confront one another but rather coexist—each asserting its own language while opening a field of encounter, where opposites find harmony: black and white, strength and suppleness, fullness and void. Between sculpture and painting unfolds a clear dialogue, a shared pursuit of balance that finds its fullest expression in this face-to-face.