Lucas Erin: La ronde

The Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne (MCBA) is pleased to present French-Caribbean artist Lucas Erin’s solo exhibition La ronde, newly commissioned for its Project Space.

Erin’s work revolves around installation, sculpture and sound. Interested in the notion of contact of which objects are the trace, attentive to the relationship between inside and out and the shifting boundary separating the two, the artist explores what unfolds or fails in an exchange. Questions of circulation and sharing are central to his thinking. His found objects and carefully manufactured sculptures contain both the threads of interwoven stories and clues to narratives in the making. Inspired by thinkers of creolisation, revisiting his Martinican heritage through the prism of his connection to the land and plants that grow there, the artist works by associations, reappropriations, and shifts that allow new possibilities to emerge in the exhibition space.

The title of his exhibition—La ronde—conjures up the stroll through the garden at dawn. It refers to the rhythms of the seasons and of vegetation across different latitudes, but also to the various timescales that overlap in a single place: the deep time of nature at grips with the accelerated pace of its exploitation and transformation, as well as the time of colonial history and its ramifications in the reality and imagination of the present. The materials used by the artist—whether bronze, burnt sand, or cable sheaths—convey and condense questions of temporality and circulation, of one material state to another, of one place to another, of one time period to another.

Bronze petals formed by pouring molten metal from a crucible are displayed on the walls, some falling to the floor at irregular intervals. Held together in the shape of flowers by coloured cable sheathings, the petals bring to mind a garden in bloom. Through their materiality, dropping bronze petals also evoke other kinds of falls—those of bronze monuments which, were it not for the collective will to keep them standing as symbols of violent colonial histories, would eventually collapse of their own accord. But unlike monuments, Erin’s petals are fragile, ever-changing objects that fall and continue their life on the ground, before returning to the wall only to fall once again. They circulate; they are in motion.

Movement can be read in the objects even when they are static. In Ti Biten (2026), bronze undergoes a constant metamorphosis through contact with unstable and shifting materials—burnt sand, graphite, and electricity. The very title of the piece is evocative. Ti biten means “a little thing” in Creole and sounds like the French word butin, booty or plunder, an allusion to both something reclaimed and something taken by force. It is therefore always a question of circulation, of words and goods, of what is stolen away and what returned—or not. Yet from circulation, whether voluntary or forced, a form of connection is invariably born.

Curated by Nicole Schweizer, Curator of contemporary art, MCBA

Biography
Lucas Erin (b. 1990, lives and works in Lausanne) has had solo exhibitions at Kissed Then Burned in Geneva (2025), La Salle de bains in Lyon (2024), di volta in volta art in Paris (2024), and All Stars in Lausanne (2021), among others. He has also taken part in numerous group exhibitions, including shows at MCBA (Lausanne), Circuit (Lausanne), Helmhaus (Zurich), and CAPC (Bordeaux).

After graduating in Visual Arts from the École cantonale d’art de Lausanne in 2016 he has been active in the independent art scene, as a cofounder of the Happy Baby Gallery (Crissier, 2013–2016) and a team member of La Colonie in Paris (2016–2020). He has also co-curated a number of projects between Paris and Lausanne. Lucas Erin was awarded the 2022 Leenaards Foundation Cultural Grant in the Visual Arts and is the recipient of the Manor Art Prize Vaud (2026).

Publication
Nicole Schweizer (ed.), Lucas Erin. La ronde, with essays by Chus Martínez and Noémi Michel, an interview with the artist by Deborah-Joyce Holman, contributions by Adama Keïta and Daisy Lambert, and an introduction by Nicole Schweizer. Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts de Lausanne & Les Presses du Réel, 2026, Fr./Engl.

At the MCBA Book- and Giftshop: shop.mcba@plateforme10.ch

For more information on the full public program: mcba.ch/en/agenda

For press and images: mcba.ch/en/press/

Acknowledgement
The exhibition and publication have been generously supported by the Manor Art Prize Vaud.