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.

(Text by Henri van Melle)