Born in 1980. He lives and works in Plouégat-Guerand, France.
For nearly twenty years, Guillaume Castel has sculpted the natural world surrounding him. Having grown up in the Bay of Morlaix, he developed an interest in botany from a very young age. This passion has led him to observe and study plants, their structures and their patterns. His vast knowledge allows him to free himself of the need for exact reproduction. At a young age, Guillaume Castel discovered Andy Goldsworthy’s Land Art. He also admires the great sculptors of the twentieth century, from Brancusi to Venet, from Moore to Serra. These figures make up the artist’s mental sculptural universe. Guillaume Castel likes being up close and personal with his materials. He uses industrial materials, especially wood and metal. He knows the origin of the woods he uses, the history of the forest it came from, and the qualities of each particular variety. Working with metal presents some technical challenges to the artist, such as working on a large-scale or completing complex soldering. His works are born of this paradox:freezing the living in industrial materials, since the poetry of Castel’s works comes from the organic forms he depicts. His manipulation of the raw material aims to capture the light. The artist thus reworks a universal rule of the plant world by playing with the tension between the internal and the external. His surfaces are variously smooth, hammered, polished, lacquered, waxed, raw or worked by repeated gestures.
Guillaume Castel completed two public commissions in 2019, one for the city of Tournefeuille and the other for a museum in Brittany. The two 1.90-meter Dulse sculptures were exhibited at the "Métamorphose" exhibition in 2021 at the Domaine départemental de la Roche-Jagu. In 2023, one was showcased in Évreux and another at Mascaret, in the Orangerie du Sénat at the Jardin du Luxembourg.
Presented by Galerie Ariane C-Y
