Samuel Latour unwittingly sculpts the innermost beings of others. The artist creates and shapes abstract sculptures in which his own journey becomes the starting point for a story that others will tell (themselves).
His sculptures, once completed, belong to those who look at them.
Vertical electrocardiograms, they appeared to me as bursts of life captured in matter. Sculpted emotions defying heaviness rather than gravity.
When asked this question, Samuel gives free rein to our imagination, leaving no stone unturned in assumptions and allowing his works a new life, a new echo that resonates differently in each person's eye and emotions.
This generosity is one of the traits that strikes you when you meet the artist. There is a total abandon and trust in the connection he places between his work and those who will discover it.
It is with this same prodigality that he welcomes me into his studio in Toulouse, where he has settled after a veritable artistic pilgrimage.
He had the workshop in transit, sharing, traveling and even sometimes interior before taking root in the pink city.
A graduate of the Boulle school, which he joined in the second year of Art turning, it was the profession of Art bronze worker that would fascinate him as soon as he left school and he would work with great designers in Paris and Berlin as well as with foundries.
A gleaner of know-how and horizons, each discovery is a new passion, each new gesture a new path.
A year of vibrant travel discoveries in Nepal, Burma and Vietnam where he discovered other skills, other heritages and traditions and shaped his aesthetic horizon, towards ever more openness and freedom, of gesture and creation.
He works in a permanent exploration of volumes, materials, wood, bronze or even plaster, of varied and precise know-how such as wood turning, casting or chiseling on bronze and abstract expression.
The thread that binds this beautiful trinity is an undeniable fantasy, free and unfettered, born from artistic inspirations as well as from the smallest details of everyday life. And it is these stories of silent yet vivid eloquence that her sculptures invite us into.
Bubble wrap rolls play tightrope walkers high above, while in another room, shelves are adorned with essays, explorations, and old works.
At the back, there is a desk where sketches sit alongside a computer, an essential tool that connects him to his students (he has been in charge of the wood workshop at the Toulouse School of Fine Arts _I.SDAT_ since 2018) and as an essential link with his clients who cover a horizon almost as broad as his own.
Despite the sanding noise from the neighboring workshop, there reigns a joyful serenity, an unshakeable enthusiasm, and it is with this feeling of lightness that one leaves his workshop.
