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)
The Palais idéal du Facteur Cheval in Hauterives in the Drôme region is closing this summer the cycle of summer exhibitions it initiated three years ago in homage to Agnès Varda.
Entitled “Correspondences,” this three-chapter exploration explores the connections that Agnès Varda has woven over time with this unique place.
This final section is perhaps the most important in closing the emotional affinity between the place hosting the exhibition and the artistic work of the woman it celebrates: it explores the genesis of their encounter.
It goes back in time, to the moment when the bond between this incredible place and the artist was formed, even before she was Varda.
A prodigious place born from the imagination of a postman who saw it in his dreams and spent 33 years collecting stones during his rounds on foot to assemble them in the evening and thus create his ideal palace.
This dream palace with its necessarily unique architecture was love at first sight for Varda, already a collector of beautiful stamps, when she visited it for the first time in the early 1950s, captivated by its history and the profession of the man who had built it.
This last chapter, called "Oh seasons, Oh castles", like the filmmaker's first short film, revisits it with poetry by offering installations, chapters around escape, the passing of the seasons, holidays, her world between Noirmoutier, the birds, Sète, Belgium and her childhood memories.
A moment of grace, between memories, poetry and incredible architecture.
We push open the door of this institution whose name is whispered as an essential guilty pleasure during the literary salon hosted by Brive-la-Gaillarde and we discover a place that time seems to have remained untouched, so transporting is the decoration.
Photo credit: Chez Francis
We pass a cash register that seems to still receive Louis Napoleons to sit on real bistro benches, under Art Deco lights and entirely surrounded by walls scribbled, drawn, decorated by all the passing artists.
All the French illustrators seem to have had a good time here, extolling from the ceiling to the walls, for one, terrine, for another, pâté croûte, chicken and pickles or even real, freshly made bugnes.
Photo credit: Chez Francis
The immaculate tablecloths showcase the best of the Limousin region, the family-prepared cuisine is generous and authentic, giving the rare impression of being distinguished guests among distant cousins.
The walls don't lie: the flavors and wines are worth the detour!
