Maubuisson Abbey offers a sensory journey with seven artists as guides to these new lands where the senses intertwine.
Hearing, sight, touch, taste and smell intertwine in works to be felt for a fabulous poetic journey with the superb Abbey as a setting.
We seem to feel the color, see the softness and hear the scents.
An almost initiatory sensory journey in a historic place.
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“Sentience, listening to the scent of color”
from March 29 to September 1, 2024
Cistercian Abbey of Maubuisson , Saint-Ouen-l'Aumône
It is an unclassifiable place, almost out of the imagination, at the crossroads of the charming incongruity of Lewis Caroll and a refrain of Charles Trenet, a place of harmonious collusion where reverie becomes real, the flea market - tea room, the tea room - antique dealer, the antique dealer - gallery and the gallery - jam house... And time suspended.
La maison d'Horbé, a richly decorated flea market and tea room nestled in a charming village in the Perche region, is an unclassifiable place where three generations delight the senses, from homemade tarts and cakes under cloches to marvels picked with precision and passion, all wrapped in the aroma of jams simmering in a cauldron.
A delicious interlude
Horbé's House
Main Square - La Perrière 61360 LA PERRIERE
Shy, he is nevertheless there.
Although it may not yet be displaying its new colors and its azure sky is not yet assured, spring is nevertheless here, and very much here.
Behind the scenes, he foments whirlwinds and impulses, desires and renewals with an even more intense passion for what he makes himself languish.
New pages open, and new chapters begin.
Spring is awakening. And with it our love of beauty.
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.
Between two, uncertain and unpredictable, the blue hour is that lapse of time that stretches between shadow and light, at dawn or dusk when the two embrace for a brief moment.
From this furtive tango springs a deep and serene azure, which erases the darkness and colors, almost inhabits, the light.
From this fleeting exchange a rare magic is born, in a brief instant the poetry of all things appears.
In the heart of winter, we celebrate heating blue, cobalt, turquoise, ultramarine, cyan, Klein, turquin, sapphire or celestial, to remind ourselves that the blue hour is above all an inner journey.
Ariane Crovisier is a self-taught sculptor and art therapist, gesture is her saving verb which, like a living wave, captures, transmits, transforms and liberates.
She shapes the earth as much as the void, which she works as a material in its own right in the Chinese manner and in which emerges the intimate dialogue that she establishes with the earth.
His sculptures invite us to a ballet of intimacy, a silent correspondence where the material fully deploys its emotional power.
The void is a shelter, a haven of meaning, emotions and mineral poetry, and its exploration changes, thanks to the different possible supports of each sculpture that we place according to our own sensory peregrinations, and offers an almost infinite rediscovery.
There is a strong echo of the works of Savin Couelle, who worked on the sensitive and the intimate through architecture, using the living space as a medium; Ariane Crovisier's sculptures offer an emotional shelter in the absence of a habitat, but in the same vein, in the same questioning of the intimate.
In this untying of matter, strength and vulnerability are on first contact and emanate from the same gesture, closely linked, almost melted into one another.
She likes the fact that we can project what we want onto it and make what we see our own. For her, human, animal, plant and mineral elements intermingle, merging and offering themselves fully to each person's universe.
The sculpture she chose to present is called Hito, or "standing woman" in Japanese. It is a work that is different from her usual path.
While all his pieces have several supports and can be placed as we wish, this one has only one base and yet illustrates the quintessence of his work, in his choice to play with textures, exposed and sheltered spaces, all tied together in a unique momentum.
Hito soars more than any of Ariane's other sculptures, it is erected with aplomb, a struggle between matter and emptiness, a surge towards and into life, an affirmation and a triumph sweeping away doubts.
She evokes meditation, the feminine, sensuality, incarnation. A woman standing in every possible sense.
There are objects, moments, places, encounters that are indescribably poetic; no words can describe the delicacy and emotion that unfolds there.
The work of Cyril Maisonnave, unclassifiable, singular, with a unique and rare aesthetic alphabet, is fully part of it.
The "knitting artist" humbly says that he does not know how to write poetry, so he tries to knit it, and each of his creations makes this sentence vibrate intensely.
Over the course of a thousand and one lives, as a cook, textile designer or visual arts teacher, the artist has woven his own personal thread of Ariadne, creating his own mysteries of beauty.
Deeply driven by the importance of transmission, his work focuses on everyday objects as privileged witnesses to the passage of time.
This is how his spoons evoke the trace of what has been, as if they themselves had already lived a thousand and one lives and crossed the erosion of time; objects of the archaeology of the future which both exhume memory and already carry within them the gaze of those who will discover them.
They all tell a story depending on the material chosen. Made of metal, plant matter, or porcelain, they bear witness to a perpetual dream of memory, one in which we collect, give, and transmit the most important thing: the imprint of memory.
Cyril Maisonnave knits the very essence of time.
Summers are not meant to be remembered, but to be remembered.
Their echo is often more intense than their reality.
The memory of the caress of the sun is warmer and more lasting than the fleetingness of feeling. real of its rays.
We regretfully leave summer behind, but bathed in its light and charged with its energy, we rush into the new school year.
A perpetual summer.
Welcome to La Consigne!
Selection (clockwise):
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.
The geometry, lines, colors and porticos of Daniel Burren take up their summer quarters on the island of Arz.
This exhibition entitled "Detour of roads and paths" offers a bucolic stroll enhanced with Art to embrace and enhance the calm and exceptional environment of this little Breton paradise.
It was a chance encounter in a small restaurant on the island that initiated this wonderful project; the curator of the Artist's exhibition, who spends his summer vacation on the Breton island every year, was having lunch in a small, fully booked restaurant. He was asked if he could share his table with a gentleman who was also alone. He was the mayor of the Isle of Arz.
Their shared passion for the island and Art will do the rest.
Daniel Burren called upon two island artisans to create the works and was inspired by the sails that can be seen on the horizon over the gulf from the island's shores.
An art walk in total communion with nature, to be discovered until October 30 on the island of Arz.
Island of Arz
Until October 30, 2023
56500 Bignan - Free entry
This summer, the Palais des Papes is home to the lush vegetation that Eva Jospin brings out of cardboard.
Eva Jospin, a former resident of the Villa Medici, plants her impenetrable forest, half-tale, half-nightmare, in the attic of the Hôtel de Mongelas and invites us to lose ourselves or find ourselves there.
The artist, whose preferred material is cardboard, returns it to the form from which it is taken and sculpts dense forests from which we seem to hear the murmurs, the creaking and the breath of the wind.
Raw, disheveled, almost jagged, the cardboard bends to its universe and blends fully into its new identity as a forest. Meticulous and astonishing, his work is an open door to all dreams, almost a passage to other universes.
An irresistible call to the forest, to the back roads, to the mysterious, the clear, to elsewhere, to oneself.
"Palazzo" - Eva Jospin
Until January 1 , 2024
Palace of the Popes – Avignon (84)
Birthdays, the impatience to celebrate them, the delicious anticipation of imagining the joys and pleasures of celebrating them, undoing and redoing the guest list, are high moments of childhood celebration. Time fades them and repetition extinguishes their intensity, making them familiar, patinated with the predictability of repeating.
It is this original effervescence that Coline Gaulot, visual artist, has brought back to life by freezing it in the celebratory piece, the culmination of these memories, the birthday cake.
The artist presents 26 white porcelain birthday cakes topped with birthday candles at the Museum of Earthenware and Tableware in Samadet.
Named "the great fire", for the mini vanity pyres captured forever in porcelain, devoid of color like an emotional transfer where each person can imprint the echo of their memory which now belongs to us.
A delicate and joyful return to childhood through that of the artist.
The Great Fire (Joyeux A) Coline Gaulot
Until October 29, 2023
Departmental Museum of Earthenware and Tableware, Samadet (40)
