Beyond Our Horizons proposes craft as a living, thinking language—one shaped by matter, time, and those who use it. Conceived through an artistic consortium between France and Japan, the exhibition invites us to step beyond the familiar, not in abandon of tradition, but through a subsuming expansion of contemporary thought.
First presented in Tokyo and later reconfigured at la Galerie du 19M, the project unfolds as an immersive environment. Inspired by the relationships between ‘nature and creation’, the exhibition moves through the principles of earth, water, fire, wind, and air—materials, energies, and conditions that shape both our individual livelihood and broader societal fabric as it influences everything from foundational infrastructures to modern understandings of time and reason.
Structured as a sequence of five chapters, the exhibition celebrates the cross-cultural exchange between French maisons d’art and Japanese craftsmanship, where inherited techniques are placed in dialogue with new interpretations, allowing tradition to appear not as something preserved, but as something continually reactivated. Materials are approached as carriers of memory and transformation, and processes reveal themselves through patience, repetition, and care.
Within this shared landscape, each artist asserts a distinct voice. Julian Farade’s work occupies a fertile threshold between abstraction and codification, where colour and form convey states of tension and instability. His paintings engage with emotional charge as a material in itself, allowing ambiguity to remain active rather than resolved. Clara Imbert approaches sculpture as a mode of inquiry, drawing from scientific structures and symbolic systems alike. Her works evoke instruments or fragments of measurement, proposing forms that oscillate between the transcendental and terrestrial. Simone Pheulpin’s practice introduces a profound sense of duration and discipline. For more than four decades, she has developed a singular sculptural language through the repetitive folding of raw cotton, producing works that evoke geological and organic formations. Her contributions anchor the exhibition in an ethics of patience, where the process of identical iterations becomes both method and meaning. While Pauline Guerrier brings an itinerant sensibility shaped by voyaging and ritual. Working between Paris and Lisbon, her practice consists of a constellation of profound messages through many mediums.
Alongside these voices, newly invited artists and designers extend the conversation, offering their own interpretations of Beyond our Horizons through sculpture, ceramics, textiles, and light. Together, these practices affirm a shared conviction: that the métiers d’art are not vestiges of the past, but vehicles towards contemporary modes of thought.
hube: Your work often plays with instability, abstraction, and the human figure. How does this tension echo your own sense of physicality, if at all?
Julian Farade: Tension resonates with me through experience, and physicality is experience on a personal level—the spatiality of emotion. The human figure is a new theme for me. I like instability because it feels more true to life, at least as I experience it. I think ideas of security are often false or disguised as control. I’m not sure about abstraction; many artists I admire use the term ‘figural’. I’m drawn to works that carry more than one meaning, which is why I tend to leave them open-ended—but it’s not literal abstraction. Maybe that’s the tension.
h: Your work often unfolds at an architectural scale. What first led you toward large- scale installation, and how did your relationship with the materials that shape your practice develop over time?
Clara Imbert: I think my attraction to large-scale installation comes from my relationship to space and to the body. Architecture seems to have the capacity to reveal what is invisible; a space becomes a place, defined and inhabited. It creates a dialogue between the body and its surroundings, guiding us through its walls and allowing escape through its openings. I don’t see my work as separate from the space it occupies. Architecture becomes a framework that activates the piece and, in return, the piece alters how the space is experienced. Working at an architectural scale allows me to engage the viewer physically, not just visually, inviting them to move, pause, feel tension, or simply observe. At the same time, I believe that smaller pieces can hold just as much power and can still be architectural. The mind has an extraordinary capacity for projection and imagination. Sometimes I create a smaller piece while thinking of it in a spatial or environmental context, imagining how it might one day expand into a larger space. Working on a more immersive scale, however, allows for a sense of envelopment and directly confronts us with our own physicality. I like to imagine the encounter with an artwork as a romantic one: first a moment of surprise, followed by a feeling of familiarity.
My relationship with materials developed in parallel. As the scale grew, so did my understanding of weight, balance, and resistance. I am interested in materials that come from the ground, that are a fragment of our own history, metal, stone, sand, glass. They relate to one another in a circular way. The materials also teach me patience and resilience; I can push them, but sometimes I have to stop and just listen. In that sense, scale is never about monumentality; it is about finding a form that resonates with our own physical presence in the world.
