French duo Île/Mer/Froid brings together ceramics, wood, textiles and a circle of fellow artists in a rough-edged meditation on craft, collaboration and the hand of the maker.
To reach La Verrière, Hermès’ contemporary art space in Brussels, you first have to walk through one of its boutiques. Past the silk scarves, leather goods and immaculate vitrines of the Boulevard de Waterloo store, the choreography of luxury gives way to something wild. At the back, almost unexpectedly, a white gallery opens beneath a steel-and-glass roof, flooded with daylight and seemingly removed from the polished world you have just crossed.
Here, clay bulges and buckles, tree trunks become pedestals, and lengths of linen stained with plant dyes hang in tobacco browns and bruised ochres. One black ceramic creature perches on a section of timber; elsewhere, two hefty stoneware heads sit on rough wooden supports.The route through the boutique makes for an unusually good introduction. On one side, Hermès presents the end result of craftsmanship pushed towards precision. Behind it is a room where the knots, scorch marks and fingerprints are what gives the objects on display life.
Image: Juliette Coquelet & Joachim Demay
A garage under glass
La Verrière is one of four contemporary art spaces run by the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès, established in 2008 to support artistic creation and the transmission of craft. Its exhibition programme stretches from Brussels to Seoul and Tokyo, with a fourth space at the Saint-Louis crystalworks in eastern France. Artists are often invited to produce new work specifically for these settings, rather than simply bringing a finished exhibition into a white cube.
That approach feels particularly apt at La Verrière. Originally an automobile garage, the space was converted into a gallery after Hermès acquired the site in 1999, its great glass roof becoming both its defining architectural feature and the source of its name.
Since 2023, curator Joël Riff has steered it towards the sometimes awkward border between contemporary art, craft and the decorative arts. His exhibitions are conceived as “augmented solos”: a single artist or practice provides the centre of gravity, while works by others are brought in to unsettle, extend or simply keep it company.
“Elle/Terre/Chaude”, on view until 14 November, fits the formula particularly well because its central artist is already two people. Île/Mer/Froid is the name under which Hugo Lemaire and Boris Geoffroy have worked together for more than a decade. Around 50 works fill La Verrière, many produced for the exhibition, alongside pieces by ceramicist Richard Dewar, sculptors Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel, photographer Marianne Marić and Brussels painter Julien Meert. Ceramicist and writer Philippe Godderidge contributes a commissioned text.
Four hands, one practice
Lemaire and Geoffroy met at the Toulouse Institute of Arts and Design in 2014. Their practice subsequently travelled through Rome, Sète, Brest and La Borne, the French village closely associated with ceramics, before they settled in Salmiech in the Aveyron region. Their farmhouse is home, workshop and, in part, sawmill.
It sounds less like an artist’s studio than the back room of an inventive agricultural operation. A Bourgeois potter’s wheel shares space with machinery repurposed from other trades: a baker’s kneading machine mixes slurry, while a grain grinder processes raw clay. At one point, a supplier delivered 15 tonnes of clay to the property.
The work itself moves between the pair just as freely and there is little interest in preserving individual authorship. A piece can pass backwards and forwards through four hands until the question of who made which mark becomes irrelevant.
That helps explain the wonderfully odd physicality of the show. Stoneware vessels appear thick-set and slightly belligerent. Timber is sawn and assembled without being scrubbed of its previous life as a tree. Sheets coloured with vegetable dyes droop from supports like old stage scenery or washing left too long in smoke. The two dark ceramic heads reproduced in the exhibition material look less like formal sculpture than figures that might have been dug out of a field.
Riff writes that Lemaire and Geoffroy “use the material without mastering it”. It is a useful distinction. Their interest lies in finding out what a technique might do rather than demonstrating how perfectly they can repeat it. They pick things up from potters, craftspeople, landscapes and one another; sometimes the material gets the last word.
A handful of guest artists widen the visual field at La Verriere. Richard Dewar brings decades of experience in wood-fired ceramics. Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel offer another example of an artistic identity shared between two people. Marić’s photographs and Meert’s paintings break up the clay and timber, giving the room a welcome change of rhythm.
Riff has described La Verrière as “a hearth to gather around and a lens to peer through”. The hearth feels especially apt here. “Elle/Terre/Chaude” is full of things learnt beside kilns, workshop benches, fires and other people.
Then, to leave, you walk back through Hermès.
After a moment with large scale works that retain the push of a hand and wood that still carries its scars, the immaculate objects in the boutique land differently. The connection between the two spaces is craftsmanship, but their attitudes towards its evidence diverge. Hermès makes the difficulty of craftsmanship disappear into a perfect finish. At La Verrière, the struggle gets to stay.
Image: Isabelle Arthuis FEH
“Elle/Terre/Chaude” — Île/Mer/Froid is on display from
10 September–14 November 2026 at La Verrière,
Boulevard de Waterloo 50, 1000 Brussels, Belgium.Tuesday–Saturday, 12pm–6pm
Free admissionGuided tours in French or English are available Tuesday–Friday at 12.30pm and Saturday at 3pm, without reservation.
