Artists

Samuel Francois, Kelly Weiss, Iwan Warnet

Press release

June 2025 : Kelly Weiss, Iwan Warnet and Samuel François are welcomed by La Tannerie, an art center in Brittany (France), for a month-long artistic residency. Explore the garden, unpack and arrange the paintings, observe the changing weather, share meals, gather materials, dye paper, open the windows to the dragonflies, hang each other's work, sow clues – all these were ways of immersing themselves in the situation and creating work with it. Through mutual influences, they constructed an exhibition as the sedimented traces of their presence, built for this space pierced by windows opening onto a garden and swept by the changing lights of the coastal skies. KW Precarious constructions, Kelly Weiss's untitled (trap) appear as micro-environments, like terrariums. Through the play of reflections, they reveal the irregularity of their assemblages, dust and deposits, and hint at the shapes and materials slipped inside. Oscillating between the idea of a rudimentary box and that of a model, they invite us to focus on the fragment and then perceive the whole from this new scale. Kelly Weiss is interested in polycarbonate for its translucency and its initial function of protection and separation. But also because it belongs to a standardised industrial economy linked to development, greenhouse construction and space optimisation. Transposed into the exhibition space, it becomes a pictorial surface, a sculptural construction, or re-enacts the cloudy transparency of a glass roof. IW Iwan Warnet's Wandering Lines drawings are explorations of the various possibilities of the line, of its wanderings. These dialogues between fluid bodies and plants seek to create a territory of the indefinite, where the gender of the figures no longer matters, where the lines that draw them stray. In the exhibition space, they are scattered like punctuation marks that focus attention. In the same way that, on a map, the legend gives meaning to the reading of the abstract elements that compose it, his drawings are discreet clues. They influence our perception of the paintings that surround them and give the surfaces as a whole a more emotional than formal dimension: the figures and plants emerge in shades of almond, the madder-dyed papers could be a skin, the earrings placed to a screen become traces of a presence… SF Halfway between sculpture and painting, Lay Down, 2026, synthesises several of Samuel François' concerns: working with simple materials while reducing gestures and interventions as much as possible; the relationships we have with everyday objects; and their place and function in our living spaces. The metallic surface of Lay Down welcomes stranded fragments and objects, clues that invite us to invent stories. Experiencing the silvery expanse of the ocean on an evening in June 2025…there are waves, dragonflies, the sun soon setting, «Night falls, crossed by wandering moths». A seductive and intriguing cadmium-coated surface, chrome is scattered throughout Samuel François' body of work like so many cadmium particles ingested over the months by Ferblantier. What remains if we strip away all the romantic aspects of Breton architecture in the heart of a garden during the summer? Here, in a white cube, the work reveal themselves for what they are: rusty asperities on a cotton canvas, several aspects of refined petrol, paper dyed by long-faded flowers… Each of these three practices is constructed with attention to surfaces, to the unexpectedness of their transitory states. They both like to work with what is already there, recognising the value of simple gestures, everyday materials, and processes that are sometimes discreet. Surfaces become spaces for interactions, where chemical transformations, the passage of light, traces of use converge. This is not a matter of direct representation, but rather of infusion: these surfaces are the sensory transcriptions of an environment. It is through the attention with which the artists weave links between their works and the particularities of a space that the exhibition becomes a shared environment, an installation by a trio in which each artist's forms assume their porosity to those of the others.