Solène Kerlo

Solène Kerlo is a French visual artist based in Paris and Bordeaux whose work moves between painting, sculpture, and installation. She works with living materials — beeswax, earth pigments, brass, crystallized salt — to reactivate primordial gestures and open a dialogue between the sacred and ecology. Using very few tools, and often making them herself, she works directly with her hands in an instinctive, sensory approach where touch is central. Red ochre has been present from the beginning, carrying associations with earth, fire, blood, and transformation. Her pieces evoke the earliest acts of representation, when humans first inscribed forms onto cave walls, and stand as contemporary relics exploring birth, memory, and lost civilizations. Trained in fashion design at Esmod Paris and in lost-wax casting at École Boulle, she draws on mythology, anthropology, and psychoanalysis, and casts some of her metal works with Burkinabé master founder Alassane Dermé.