Méandres, 2023

Marianne Laës  

Marianne Laës was born in 1977 in Douarnenez (Finistère).

A painter by training, she has turned to engraving and printmaking more broadly over the past ten years. Since 2019, she has set up her studio in Saint-Pol-de-Léon (29), focusing primarily on creating multiples, installations, and photographs.

In parallel, she developed the publication of artist's books and collaboration with various contemporary poetry or print magazines.

Often minimalist, her works do not seek to represent or depict the world. In this, she echoes Paul Klee, for whom "Art does not reproduce the visible, it makes visible."

Her work celebrates a form of silent presence to nature, whose imprints, layers and metamorphoses nourish her reflections and artistic choices.

His sources of inspiration are deeply rooted in the plant world, both terrestrial and marine, poetry, and the simplicity of everyday life.

She perceives art as an experimental dialogue with matter, a dialogue in which space and composition occupy a foundational place, not as mere formal devices, but as the very conditions of the sensory experience offered to the eye.

Conceived as a breathing space, the engraved surface creates zones of silence, areas left untouched, where white is never a passive void but an active presence. These unegraved spaces fully participate in the composition: they establish rhythms and pauses, allowing the forms to unfold without imposing themselves.

Accident and erasure, which she incorporates into her creative process, play a crucial role; for her, the artwork is constructed in a subtle balance between control and surrender. The unfinished, the random—like life itself—are intrinsically linked to the intimacy of her approach and lend her work a meditative dimension.

“Natural elements—minerals, plants, the sea—constitute a field of exploration rather than a subject in the strict sense. I draw from them structures, lines, tensions, which I interpret through techniques involving a direct and physical relationship with the material. Engraving and printmaking, in particular, allow me to embrace the unexpected, erasure, and superimposition, as so many signs of life." Marianne Laës