Known for his meticulous drawings of insects, birds, and other creatures hybridized with mechanical gears and intricate filigree, Steeven Salvat has a penchant for detail. Often tapping into historical analog technology like clocks, typewriters, globes, and hourglasses, the artist nods nostalgically to a pre-digital age.
Salvat’s forthcoming exhibition, Latitude/Longitude at Galerie Hamon, continues the artist’s interest in the convergence of nature and human activity. This recent body of work, created using acrylic and Chinese ink, focuses more specifically on navigation and cartography. Vintage maps, charts, and globes provide the foundation for beautiful renderings of songbirds and butterflies in a meditation on migration.
In light of the current climate crisis, migratory patterns of a wide range of creatures—from monarch butterflies to terns to gray whales—are at increased risk of disruption due to shifts in the timing of seasonal changes, habitat destruction, and more extreme weather. Salvat looks to the past as a means of thinking more critically about the inherent beauty and vulnerability of birds.
“I work on carefully sourced antique maps and navigation objects such as compasses, barometers, and globes, using them as starting points to paint different bird species,” Salvat says. “These works reflect instinctive trajectories and the memory of invisible journeys. Together, they create an immersive space, somewhere between a map room and a contemporary cabinet of curiosities.”
Latitude/Longitude runs from February 6 to March 4 in Le Havre, France. Find more on the artist’s Instagram and Behance.
