BRUSSELS.- From 10 September to 14 November 2026, the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès will present the first personal exhibition dedicated to the French duo Île/Mer/Froid in Belgium. Sculptures, ceramics, woodworks and textiles will inhabit the space in an exhibition composed of a central installation and around fifty other works, the majority of which will be specially produced for the occasion. At La Verrière, they create a whole, and are accompanied by works by ceramicist Richard Dewar, sculptors Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel, photographer Marianne Marić and painter Julien Meert.

Île/Mer/Froid is a contemporary artist duo whose name evokes both an insular, wintry atmosphere and a playful association of ideas. This collaborative body of work belongs to two friends, Hugo Lemaire and Boris Geoffroy, who have been creating together for over a decade. In a four-handed process where, according to Joël Riff, “one begins a gesture that the other continues,” they bring to light massive, almost Rabelaisian forms. Their creations combine raw materials (wood, stoneware, linen) and mixed media (carving, pottery, dyeing). The pieces emerge from the landscape in which the artists work, drawing inspiration from the surrounding nature, their encounters, local craftsmanship and folk art.

After years of a nomadic practice that took them to Rome, the ceramicists’ village of La Borne, Sète and Brest, Île/Mer/Froid settled in the Aveyron region of France. From a farmhouse that has been partially converted into a sawmill, and now serves as both a living space and a workshop, they repurpose, invent and craft. For the exhibition “Elle/Terre/Chaude”, (She/Land/Heat) Île/Mer/Froid presents a collection of new works within a dense installation where pedestals, sculptures and textiles intertwine in a dizzying array of planes and panels.

La Verrière curator Joël Riff invites Île/Mer/Froid for their first presentation outside of France. For this augmented solo presentation, their works will be shown in dialogue with ceramic objects by Richard Dewar, the sculptures of Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel, photographs by Marianne Marić and paintings by Julien Meert. Joël Riff also commissioned an original text from the ceramacist and author Philippe Godderidge for the occasion.

Inaugurated in 2000, La Verrière is one of the four exhibition spaces of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès. As part of the Foundation’s programmes to support contemporary creation, artists are invited to embrace the space with the possibility of producing new works.





“ELLE/TERRE/CHAUDE”

Île/Mer/Froid shapes itself. The conjugation occurs in the singular, through the pronominal voice. An identity materialises through what is created. It is striking.

One begins a gesture that the other continues. The material flows between the four hands of this single entity. Objects shift according to a fluid choreography of movements coordinated by intuition, one after the other. And, ultimately, it emerges. Fibre, earth and canvas are transformed upwards. A single body—monstrous and superhuman because it transcends the individual—that simultaneously moulds and models. A unity asserts itself without contradiction in the face of plurality. It’s not entirely clear, and that’s not entirely an issue. If we blur the lines, it’s surely not to explain them later on. Adopting such a name allows for open-endedness. Complementarity shines through these different energies. Growth occurs through openness, through contact with people and places, a hunger for matter. It has been this way for over a decade. They were many once, yet they are still one.

Île/Mer/Froid has settled down, only to become more cluttered. It’s all because of a heavy piece of electrical equipment for throwing pots known as a Bourgeois potter’s wheel that was given to them. Gradually, a full-fledged pottery studio has taken shape, complete with machinery borrowed from other trades, such as a baker’s kneading machine and a grain grinder, used for mixing the slurry and grinding raw clay. It was in La Borne, in a completely different region (known for its bronze-coloured sandstone), that the love for terracotta first took root. For more than five years now, they have been gently breaking free from their Berry roots. There was no clay. Now there is. A partner supplier recently had fifteen metric tons delivered, just like that, up in the mountains. Everything contributes to creating a haven, this safe space where anything is possible. At ease. And the bedrooms are upstairs. Just like any home: not elsewhere, not far away, not just another place. A home.

The exhibition “Elle/Terre/Chaude” embodies a sense of complicity. It literally involves working with someone else to fold and refold. Complexity, by definition, consists of weaving together multiplicity. We arrange the layers, those we handle and those we shape. Perhaps two halves searching for one another. The rest is to be found. This makes for a sound equation that sidesteps the single traditionalist objective. It is reinvention rather than reproduction. It is fertile ground. There is a principle of fulfilment in what every encounter produces. There may be suspicion in speaking of complicity, which a timid morality would conflate with criminal conspiracy, whereas what flourishes here is simply interaction, working together. And more than just mutual aid, it’s a combination of things we wouldn’t attempt on our own. Integrity nestles within wholeness. This complete osmosis results in fulfilling environments. A climate of hospitality truly blossoms there. A hymn to friendliness.

Île/Mer/Froid is at the core. Its heat is used to fire ceramics, dye textiles, cook food. Things smoulder, boil, simmer. They hollow out elderberry branches from the surrounding area and blow into them to feed the fire. Without any true technical expertise nor a break from tradition, the friends develop a simple interest in the material, working with it as their encounters prompt them. It is the people and the places that nourish them, bringing them to life. They use the material without mastering it. And since they are not virtuosos, they never make the same object twice. It’s about navigating between heritage and freedom, reclaiming as much as inventing. Shaping. Fascinating. The skill of others becomes one’s own material, without ostentation. And that’s how they end up making sculptures that don’t look like watercolours. When working together, nothing belongs to anyone. In practice, there is no ownership. There is no authorship to claim, except that of the collective. Together, they are both “he” and “they.”

The exhibition “Elle/Terre/Chaude” builds a bridge. It reveals what connects us, what we build together. And that requires some mental flexibility, even a bit of contortion, to better coordinate, to make ends meet, with palms and soles firmly on the ground. The slash, which gives rhythm to both the name and the title, is, in fact, more of a bridge than a wall. More dynamic than a hyphen, it allows for a breath between lines and, as in computer code, delineates the path of a directory tree. Its upward movement gives us momentum. This slash cuts through. It opens a passage to the other side. On the occasion of this first solo exhibition by the artists outside France, other links are thus forged with Richard Dewar’s pottery, the sculptures of Daniel Dewar & Grégory Gicquel, the paintings of Julien Meert, the writing of Philippe Godderidge, and the photography of Marianne Marić. Whether through friendship or kinship, direct or indirect, we savour what completes us.

--Joël Riff

ÎLE/MER/FROID

Ile/Mer/Froid is a collaborative project that brings together Hugo Lemaire (born in 1987 in Suresnes) and Boris Geoffroy (born in 1988 in Montmorency). They live and work together in Salmiech, in the Aveyron region. The duo formed in 2014 when they met at the Toulouse Institute of Arts and Design. In 2021, they were awarded a residency at the Villa Medici in Rome. Their first ceramic works date back to 2021–2022, when they undertook a wood-firing residency at Hervé Rousseau’s studio in Henrichemont, in the Cher department. Their work has been presented in solo exhibitions, primarily in France: in Sète in 2017, in Aubenas, Saint-Flour, and Clermont-Ferrand in 2024, and in Marseille in the spring of 2026.

They have also participated in group exhibitions in Nice and at the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery in Pantin in 2016, in Saint-Nazaire in 2018 and in Montpeyroux at the invitation of Vincent Honore in 2021, as well as in Belgium at Keramis – Centre de la Céramique de la Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles in La Louvière in 2024.