"CORPS LATENTS" - 16 Rue des Quatre Fils, Paris

The gallery is simultaneously presenting Planes of Light and Latent Bodies, two exhibitions dedicated to the recent works of Justin Weiler and François Maurin.

Both trained in drawing; they have made it a central principle that continues to shape their practices. In Justin Weiler’s work, the pieces unfold through glass and Indian ink on paper. The transparency of the materials, the layering of planes, and subtle shifts of light create unstable perceptual spaces, where the image gradually reveals itself over time and through the viewer’s shifting gaze.

François Maurin’s wall-mounted sculptures, crafted from carved wood and resin, engage directly with the body and presence. Their vertical forms, hollowed and tensioned through line, strike a balance between structural rigor and organic fluidity. The wall becomes a supporting plane from which the drawing extends seamlessly into the material.

With their shared focus on structure, materiality, and the conditions in which form comes into being, their works continue to explore questions inherited from modernity, particularly the interplay of line, space, and perception expressed through a fully contemporary visual language.

Presented in separate spaces, these two exhibitions reveal independent trajectories emerging from a common origin, where drawing continues to serve as an active framework, orchestrating the interplay between form, material, and space.
 

François Maurin — Corps latents 

François Maurin’s wall sculptures, carved from wood and sealed with resin, rise as vertical presences sustained by a subtle tension between structure and organic growth. Rooted in drawing, their underlying lines articulate hollowed, stretched, and at times segmented forms that suggest both bodily fragments and figures still in the making. The wood shaped through its weight, density, and grain retains a palpable vitality, while the resin arrests the surface in a suspended state, poised between emergence and permanence.

This interplay between geometric discipline and organic fluidity recalls the architecture of Oscar Niemeyer, where structural clarity is inseparable from a deeply embodied experience of space. In Maurin’s work, structure never hardens into a closed or self-contained system; it seems animated from within, charged with a restrained yet persistent energy. The wall becomes a surface of inscription and supports a generative threshold from which forms detach themselves, unfold, and assert their independence.

Belonging to a generation of artists for whom the vegetal realm serves less as a motif than as a sensorial horizon, Maurin advances a sculptural language attuned to processes of growth, tension, and metamorphosis. In his work, drawing acts as an underlying framework an invisible armature that calibrates the balance of materials and orchestrates the work’s embodied presence in space.

- Henri van Melle