Saverio Lucariello. Exercice de Lévitation

Saverio Lucariello. Exercice de Lévitation, Paris, Éditions Lord Byron, 2026

First edition
Special edition of 30 copies, numbered I to XXX, each accompanied by an original work by the artist
Hardcover, 23 × 28 cm, 360 pages
Bilingual edition: French and English
English translation by John Barrett and Annette Malochet
ISBN: 978-2-488446-21-1

This publication received support through the ADAGP Support Fund's “Bourse Collection Monographie” grant.

Saverio Lucariello. Exercice de Lévitation is the most comprehensive monograph published to date on the French-Italian artist. Edited under the direction of Olivier Kaeppelin and Laurent de Verneuil, it offers an unprecedented survey of Lucariello's entire body of work, encompassing his painting, sculpture (concrete works, ceramics, and other mixed-media techniques), photography, video, and performance practice. The volume is enriched by essays by Olivier Kaeppelin and Jean-Paul Blanchet, together with the republication of seminal texts essential to an understanding of the artist's work by Patricia Brignone, Jean-Pierre Cometti, Bernard Lamarche-Vadel, and Philippe Vergne.

Saverio Lucariello (1958–2023) was a French-Italian artist born in Naples, whose multidisciplinary practice encompassed painting, sculpture, video, and performance. Active primarily in France from 1988 onward, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and the Faculty of Architecture in Naples before settling in France in the late 1980s. In addition to his longstanding collaboration of nearly fifteen years with Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois in Paris, he also exhibited with TZR Galerie in Germany and Galerie Ferdinand van Dieten-d'Eendt in Amsterdam. Numerous institutions devoted monographic exhibitions to his work, including the Galerie municipale Édouard Manet in Gennevilliers, the Musée Carnavalet in Paris, the Abbaye de Saint-André – Centre d'art contemporain in Meymac, Le 19, Centre Régional d'Art Contemporain in Montbéliard, the FRAC Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur in Marseille, the FRAC Pays de la Loire in Carquefou, Ceaac in Strasbourg, Espace Croisé in Roubaix, and Villa Arson – Centre national d'art contemporain in Nice. His work has also been presented at the Musée Gassendi in Digne-les-Bains, the Fonds départemental d'art contemporain de l'Essonne – Domaine de Chamarande, the Musée d'Art de Toulon, Castel Sant'Elmo in Naples, the Musée d'Art contemporain de Marseille, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the Palais de Tokyo and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Guangdong Museum in Guangzhou, the Centre national de la photographie in Paris, La Centrale for Contemporary Art in Brussels, the Musée de Narbonne, La Maison Rouge – Fondation Antoine de Galbert in Paris, the Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris, the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Brest, the Musée d'Art contemporain de Lyon, the Museum of Art in Macau, the Centre national d'art contemporain in Grenoble, the National Centre for Contemporary Art in Nizhny Novgorod, the Samara Museum of Contemporary Art, the Krasnoyarsk Museum of Contemporary Art, Haus der Kunst in Munich, the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein in Berlin, and, notably, the 46th and 48th Venice Biennales, dAPERTutto, curated by Harald Szeemann.

Jean-Paul Blanchet is a French art critic, specialist in contemporary art, and independent exhibition curator. He is President and co-founder, together with Caroline Bissière, of the Centre d'art contemporain in Meymac. He also initiated the forward-looking Première programme, designed for recent graduates of art schools and offering selected artists the opportunity to participate in their first professional exhibition.

Patricia Brignone is an art historian and art critic. She teaches contemporary art at the École supérieure d'art de Grenoble. She is the author of the study on interdisciplinary practices, Ménagerie de verre: nouvelles pratiques du corps scénique. Her more recent contributions include So Specific Objects for the exhibition catalogue Ne pas jouer avec des choses mortes (Nice: Villa Arson) and Date limite de conservation (Vitry-sur-Seine: MAC/VAL).

Jean-Pierre Cometti (1944–2016) was a French philosopher. After teaching in Morocco, the Netherlands, and Germany, he became Professor at the Université de Provence in 1992 before teaching aesthetics at the École supérieure d'art d'Avignon. He authored numerous books and essays devoted to American philosophy and aesthetics, the work of Robert Musil, and the philosophies of John Dewey and Ludwig Wittgenstein. He also published on and/or translated works by Wittgenstein, Russell, Rorty, Searle, Lewis, Goodman, Dewey, Apel, Levinson, Putnam, Brandom, Gargani, Ferraris, Eco, and Bürger.

Olivier Kaeppelin is a French independent exhibition curator, art critic, and writer. From the 1990s through the late 2010s, he held a number of senior positions at France Culture, Radio France, the French Ministry of Culture and Communication—where he served as Director of Visual Arts from 2004 to 2010—the Palais de Tokyo, and the Fondation Maeght, which he directed from 2011 until the end of 2017. He has also been a research fellow at the École pratique des hautes études and has taught at Université Paris VIII (Department of Literature), Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Department of Art History), and the École des Beaux-Arts de Nantes.

Bernard Lamarche-Vadel (1949–2000) was a French writer, poet, art critic, and collector. A graduate of the École pratique des hautes études in the sociology of art (1970), he subsequently taught art history and sociology of art at Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne (1972–1973) and later at ICART in 1979. Alongside his work as a poet and short-story writer, he developed an influential body of art criticism during the 1970s and founded the journal Artistes. He also curated numerous exhibitions, including a Pablo Picasso retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum in Tokyo, Jean Degottex. Rétrospective and Fractures du monochrome at the Musée d'Art moderne (ARC) in 1978, and the exhibition Finir en beauté (June 1981), regarded as the inaugural event of what became known as Figuration Libre, presenting for the first time works by François Boisrond, Jean-Charles Blais, Robert Combas, Hervé Di Rosa, Rémi Blanchard, Jean-Michel Alberola, and Catherine Viollet. Lamarche-Vadel also published numerous monographs on modern and contemporary artists, including Jean-Pierre Pincemin (1979), Michelangelo (1981), Helmut Newton (1981), Keiichi Tahara (1984), Alberto Giacometti (1984), Joseph Beuys (1985), Pierre Klossowski (1985), Arman (1987), and Roman Opalka (1987).

Philippe Vergne, born in 1966, is a French art historian and exhibition curator, and one of the leading figures in today's international museum world. Trained in law, archaeology, and art history in Paris, he has successively directed the Musée d'Art contemporain de Marseille, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Dia Art Foundation in New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles. Since 2019, he has served as Director of the Museu de Serralves in Porto, overseeing the museum's expansion. In 2026, he was appointed Artistic Director and Chief Curator of the Bass Museum in Miami Beach, where he is responsible for the institution's artistic programme and curatorial development.