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.
Dominique Mercadal's works literally challenge us: to contemplate them is to enter into conversation.
They link the organic, nature and a language whose full extent we do not yet understand, yet to which we respond instinctively.
A language engraved in stoneware, porcelain or ceramic, punched by hand, sometimes for months, embedded in grooves or points, a Morse code of the retina that required time and patience from the Artist.
It is in her studio that she welcomes me today, which is at home, in her apartment in the heart of Paris.
The place fully invites you into the aesthetic alphabet of the Artist.
Everything speaks of connection and imprints, of travels and encounters, from a carpet negotiated fiercely during a ceramics workshop in a village in the Atlas, to a piece of family furniture, to the prototype of a future stool, to old creations, to sculptures created in collaboration with Bertrand Fompeyrine; everything speaks of memory and singularity. And from these bits of horizons gleaned during different paths, the artist has orchestrated a strong, unique and rare visual imprint.
Before discussing her work further, she offers me a coffee in one of her creations, a cup with muted colors and a raw and precise elegance reminiscent of Japanese ceramics and which allows me a contact, a direct and immediate link with her work. A sensory communion. This is the ABC of her firmly established universe.
She set up her studio in her apartment for practical reasons: not having to travel, being free in her practice and with her time, even if the latter is increasingly subject to the rhythm of orders that spread over several months.
Dominique Mercadal works ceramics in a unique way, using a slab. She starts with the void rather than the material, in which she designs the surface, whereas with a block, the shape is modeled.
It seems easier to her to seek the form through this method, because she finds a similarity to working with fabrics, the profession in which she began her career.
A native of Lyon, she fell in love with silk at a young age and devoted herself to it with passion. She still treasures a whole box of samples she collected from the silk workers' backyards.
His collecting fever was such that, known to silk workers, some kept entire garbage bags of their samples that they gave him when he came by.
It was this fervor for prints and silk that led her to choose her direction, where she in turn created patterns.
A graduate of the Applied Arts of Lyon in textile design, she began her career in textiles as a “florist” mainly designing different flower patterns.
The reality of the trade was disappointing in the face of such initial enthusiasm, and the silk mills closed one after the other. She then put the loom away along with her precious collection of samples.
It was by participating in the supervision of artistic workshops for children that she reconnected with the land.
It was in her own childhood that the latter was already very present. Memories of clay collected at the bottom of the garden, then kneaded, modeled, fired in a domestic oven and painted with gouache. Martenot Art classes taken since childhood, where ceramics were already understood but as a creative, playful activity rather than a medium in its own right. A pleasant travel companion who never leaves her side, but always on the sidelines of her main path, just for pleasure.
An instinctive pleasure that invited itself back into his path to reveal itself fully in research, trial and error and patience over several years until it became a practice in its own right this time, self-taught.
She draws inspiration from landscapes. The shapes in her work appear first, a resurgence of these mineral memories, and the graphics then punctuate their contours. They sediment in layers like time, which for her does not pass but is superimposed.
It is this language of memories, of time which is enriched rather than fleeing, which appears from this marriage of forms and punching and permeates his workshop.
His sculptures suddenly appear to me as the moving landscapes that they are, running beyond their form, reminiscent of the beauties that nature has created, they have captured the dream, the memory or the emotional imprint.
And it is with more time, a new, unspeakable language and emotions that I regretfully leave his workshop, with a little envy for his blessed cat who shares its calm and expansive universe.
