Miss béton

Milène Guermont est une magicienne, une magicienne du béton.
Passez devant le mur d’une école muette et vous entendez des rires d’enfants.
Laissez courir votre main sur une belle table, le bruit de la mer vous envahit.
En fait... reine de la métamorphose du béton, ce magnifique matériau qui inquiète parfois par sa masse fabuleuse, elle adoucit, elle donne une voix, qui finalement devient peu à peu un langage.
On peut dire qu’elle a ouvert un chemin poétique qui se superpose à celui de la forme dont nous architectes, nous maitrisons le destin.

Claude PARENT
Architecte, 2012

Imperfection as Perfection

 Museums invariably say: “don’t touch.” French artist Milène Guermont says: “please do.”
She believes her art should gratify the curious hand with a direct experience of the passion that she puts into each of her works.

Guermont’s duel background in engineering and fine-arts provides an ideal platform for developing innovative concepts and materials. Her artworks in “Polysensual Concrete”, for example, are designed to be interactive. Objects made of “Craters Concrete” are characterized by dramatic surface relief, created when the artist manipulates the material at the moment of crystallization. And finally, her “Colored Engraving” process permits permanent “writing” on the surface of concrete slabs.

The genesis of Guermont’s interest in the artistic possibilities of concrete stems from a visit to Switzerland more than a decade ago when the sound of the sea emerged from a concrete wall she was touching, a classic example of synesthesia (stimulation of one sense provoking sensation in another). Since then, Guermont has sought to re-create through her work similar moments of discovery for others. She takes on faith that each of us is naturally curious for contact, interaction and experience, and no less so when it comes to art. In the typical museum setting, however, art lovers are frustrated in their desire for something to touch. And Guermont’s work rewards the tactilely curious on more than one sensory level: when touched, many of her pieces respond with light and sound depending on the magnetic field of the person who is touching.

Edward BOSLEY
Director of the Gamble House museum (CA, USA), 2012