Invite an artist. Co-build a protocol. Let the work circulate differently.
Tana Kim® invites a contemporary artist to take on an unexplored medium: the trapeze skirt and its matching bag.
The artist works from no brief. They bring their world, their series, their way of seeing.
The work produced is born from the encounter between their gesture and the textile medium.
Together, the creator and the artist develop a protocol. The artist paints. Tana Kim® shapes. The protocol transforms. What you wear today can become a painting tomorrow.
Two gestures. One same breath.
Michel Clouin has been working for years on form, trace and the dialogue between mediums.
Acrylic, oil, ink or wax paintings, on canvas, paper, Plexiglas, Rhodoïd.
From one series to the next, he reinvents himself without ever renouncing the hand, the material, the gesture.
It is this consistent commitment to excellence that led Nathalie to offer him the Tana Kim® medium.
His series Danses and Retours now live on the pieces of the Expression collection - worn, in movement, where no one expected them.
"My work moves between figuration and abstraction. It evolves with time — always searching for new translations, new restitutions. Each series is a reflection, like so many bricks building a perception.
I paint reality to brush against the unspeakable, I touch abstraction to reveal lived experience. To speak with one voice, to paint with one hand. My work is a walk in search of perspectives, of different gazes, each step leads to another, each canvas flows into the next, one gesture, so as not to die confined."
No two Expression pieces alike.
It carries the hand of Michel Clouin, painted directly onto the fabric, and the gesture of Nathalie Tardif who conceived and shaped it.
It is worn. It is shown. It is transformed.
Through the co-developed protocol, pieces can become paintings — the diptych (skirt/bag ensemble) transformed into a quadriptych (4 paintings).
The body is the first exhibition space. The wall is the second.
At the Musée Soulages in Rodez, Nathalie and Michel visit the Agnès Varda exhibition.
Two creative worlds facing the work of a woman who never accepted being told where and how art should live.
"I am curious. Full stop. I find everything very interesting. Real life. Fake life…" Agnès Varda Agnès Varda
This sentence could have been theirs.
