Passionate about light, volume, and color, French artist Louise de Gastines creates supernatural sculptures in glazed ceramic. Their classical beauty is disrupted by surreal compositions, where forms seem to mutate, evoking chimeras, timeless faces, or distorted fragments of anatomy.
These hybrid silhouettes, straight from a parallel world, explore the links between myth and reality. Her works create a dialogue between past and present, the perceptible and the absolute, the tangible and the invisible.
She explores the human body, the animal body, and metamorphoses, shaping their textures and polishing the bare clay to give it an almost organic vibrancy.
The appearance of color contrasts and plays a central role in her process. Working with three primary colors, she creates a unique palette of vitreous enamels that amplify the intensity, expressiveness, and sensuality of her sculptures.
Her works reinterpret ancient and modern aesthetic codes, merging classical heritage, symbolism, Art Nouveau, and surrealism. Each sculpture oscillates between seduction and strangeness, between grace and mystery.
These creations, at once technical, poetic, and philosophical, become symbolic objects, capturing a timeless emotion and feeling.
Her current project invokes myth and memory. By immersing herself in the ancient legend of the Pleiades, she begins a broader reflection on the links between the cosmos and the history of humanity. Through this series of sculptures, in which each piece embodies a stellar sister, she seeks to convey not only their singularity, but also the timeless echo of these figures of the collective imagination. Her work seems to follow a natural trajectory that, while anchoring the imagination in reality, aspires to touch eternity.
Born in 1982, she grew up surrounded by her grandmother's miniature trinkets, her grandfather's architectural plans, and her uncle's paintings. Since the 2000s, Louise de Gastines has been fully committed to art, driven by an early fascination with form and color. She has shaped her vision and expertise through a series of significant encounters. Her internships in the studios of Niki de Saint Phalle and with creators such as Kuntzel & Deygas, Sylvie Lapidouse, and Basia Embericos have immersed her in unique visual worlds, sharpening her approach, and leading her to join a model-making and prototyping workshop, where she perfected her mastery of textures, volume, and the creation of color with an airbrush. Initially an apprentice, she continued her training by joining the Industrial Design section of the Greta de la Création, du Design et des Métiers d'Art in Paris.
Fueled by self-taught work and a wide variety of professional experiences, she found clay sculpture an inexhaustible avenue of exploration. This material, both vibrant and challenging, invites her to push her limits and balance her intuition and intention. Today, guided by inner images and following intuitive documentation, she sculpts, glazes, and fires her pieces in her studio, immersed in nature.
