About
The guiding thread
It all began with a wire salad basket: a transparent world against a blue sky. Like a diligent Penelope, I unravelled the spool by pulling on the wire, and never let go… A special education teacher for 20 years, I led workshops in creation and expression with adults with mental disabilities; together, our hands improvised stories guided by our sensibilities.
After an accident, I felt the need to carve my own path. With my first spool, ten fingers, and a pair of pliers, I began to weave my canvas: a line became a trace, the wire became a weft, the weft became a form and came alive. At first through 'Mending', I reconstructed puzzles of broken objects to breathe life back into them. Imaginary or unfinished, faces then appeared, smiling or melancholic, no doubt reflecting my own states of mind. The carousel spins, animals parade, cast shadows amplify the music, and abstraction reveals itself in rhythms and vibrations.
On the technical side, improvisation is the rule; the wire and I feel our way together, the surprise always lies ahead, and the cast shadow brings its own magic. Sometimes the constraints become too great; then, like Ariadne, I pull on the thread to find my way out of the labyrinth and write other stories… It is no wonder that my personal Pantheon brings together Giacometti, Matisse, Calder, and Morandi.
Myriam Louvel
Perspectives
What I notice first is this impression of delicacy, fragility, vulnerability, antithetical to the material: iron. Iron evokes something rough, coarse, brutal. It is the machine, the weapon, war. Myriam plays on this, and it works well.
These structures define a void that becomes full: it is almost more what the wire outlines that matters than the wire itself. It brings to mind certain Chinese and Japanese paintings and their philosophy of fullness and emptiness. It belongs to the realm of calligraphy in space.
Pierre Auclerc-Galland
Painter
Her name is Myriam Louvel, a French artist, a draughtswoman like no other: she has replaced the pencil with wire.
Drawings that become true three-dimensional sculptures, at once fragile since they hold by only a thread, yet strong through their metal structure.
But here, it is the opposite: the faces radiate expression, even emotion. The artist has tamed iron and gives the impression that these wires are, in the end, more supple than they appear.
Marie-Madeleine Massé
Writer · Excerpt from her book 'The Art of Wire: In Contemporary Creation'
Poised at the precise intersection of wire (fragile) and iron (solid), Myriam Louvel's arachnean work explores lightness, rigour, and poetry. The artist gives rigid matter an unsuspected suppleness, shapes it with a peremptory gesture and imposes upon it the orders and whims of her imagination. A line? A volume? It depends... Whether one follows the meanders of the black line drawing itself through space, playing with light, or whether the eye settles at the heart of a web of dense transparencies and vibratory planes. She creates her own alphabet and, therefore, her own writing. There are passages, repetitions, circulations... There is an entanglement, a tangle, and at the same time a construction, a structure: like a mental edifice troubled by anarchic dreams. To plunge into this work is to feel the vertigo of a suggested infinity, forever out of reach.
Lionelle Courbet
Gallerist