Michelle Winckler

Born by the ocean, Michelle Winckler calls on her memories and tries to take along the observer towards her own poetic journey. Her work expresses the resonance of the gesture on the material, the print as infinite radiance, discrete vibration, a legacy of a meeting between the artist and the body of  nature.

As a curious woman, her sensitivity intuitively leads towards materials, which bear the trace of time. Rusted metal, stuffed with memories, a remembrance of things of the past, the labour of men and her father whose memory she wants to honour. Glass, a complex, generous, demanding material obtained by fusion, turning from a liquid to a solid state.

Sometimes opaque or crystal clear, irradiated from the very inside of the works, it attracts light and directs it. Choosing wood is an adventure, since it keeps the memory of a long vegetable life. As a living material, wood is close to us: it has a heart; it breathes, works, ages, and dries.

Thirsting for discoveries, Michelle Winckler likes the unknown, getting acquainted with new methods, tracing and following grooves of an ever-renewed experiment. In the course of time, this unexplainable yearning for creation feeds her work with an inexhaustible energy.

A sensitive observer, her eye is set on the imperceptible strangeness of the details and makes it the source of her major inspiration. There is no message to convey, simply the history of feelings gleaned here and there and then transcribed to be shared.

The artists invite us to experience a second reality, a parallel reality to the everyday world. This second reality of things that Michelle Winckler offers us is called poetry.

Once transformed into sculpture, what would have gone unnoticed becomes an object of fascination; their verticals lift us, their spirals draw us in, their curves, scrolls, and circles transmit their movement to us. Wood, mineral, crystal, and metal take shape in our imagination, all becoming objects of poetic meditation.

The titles tell us this: “Carried by the wind,” “Strandings,” “In the Garden of Dreams,” “The Surging Wave”... Far from clarifying the enigma of each piece in its abstraction, the titles instead open the imagination to new and always dreamlike interpretations. But transgression is not applied only to the material.

It also affects the scale, creating a subtle ambiguity in reading, where debris becomes monumental, and a fragment becomes legible in the vastness. Fire has passed through, and so has ice, evoked by crystal, freezing the moment in its most fleeting form. Michelle Winckler plays with time, scale, and materials in their unusual encounters, where erosion is seen as the writing of a new poetry. Michelle plays with light, subtly guiding it along rings or curves, sometimes barely suggested or following an imperious vertical when two unusual materials come together.

How high can such verticals rise? How far can the erosion of wood, crystal, glass, and metal go? How much transparency can be accumulated?

Daniel LACOMME, Painter

I love trees; I know them, caress them, and talk to them.

I have always had a fascination for trees; the bond between them and me is deep and goes back to childhood, where I built huts—trunks, branches, leaves—everything was a pretext. The tree appeals to the sensitive and the human; with its wrinkled skin, its cracks, its wounds, its sap, its arms raised to the sky, its feet rooted in the earth. Is it to preserve this pact that I use this medium? From tree to wood... In a process of stripping away, where material is gradually removed, the tree no longer resembles itself; it becomes mass, solid, void, signs, and traces...

I must inhabit the void, play with it, and attempt to sublimate the material. Draw inspiration from its form, its fibers, its color, its scent, its appearance, its density, its texture, its rings, its knots, its cracks, its accidents recorded deep within its body.

And there, deposit my reveries.

The tree, as material, a material of memory, memory of time passing, material for meditation.

It is an inexhaustible subject, allowing me to move from nature to symbol, from the material to the spiritual, from man to the sensitive world of abstraction.

Michelle Winckler