Creative Evolution by Florent Poussineau

Florent Poussineau
Website & Instagram

French artist in residence Florent Poussineau, explores the intersection of taste, memory, and material. Renowned for transforming edible mediums into ephemeral sculptures, his food-based installations challenge perceptions of consumption, pleasure, and impermanence. This exhibition also debuts a new series of paintings combining gouache and oil paint, focused on the human skeletal figure, blending anatomical precision with emotional abstraction. This open studio event marks the capstone of Poussineau’s five-week artist residency at The Factory on Willow, giving visitors a unique opportunity to engage directly with his creative process and view the full breadth of his evolving practice.

The exhibition is part of a reflection on the movement of living matter and on the notion of duration within material itself. It explores creation as a process of continuous transformation. Here, painting and sculpture do not settle into a fixed form: they build themselves, transform, and renew. The works emerge from a fragile balance between gesture and chance, between the artist’s intention and the autonomy of the material. What unfolds in this exhibition is less the completion of a work than the secret life of forms — their ability to endure, to mutate, to resist time.

Painting becomes a living organism.
On glass or wood, oil and gouache engage in a dialogue repelling, contaminating, and merging with each other. The material spreads, soaks in, sometimes fades, as if the paint were following its own path. The artist does not seek to control it; he accompanies it, letting it construct itself between chance and necessity.
These images evoke the still life, yet their surface breathes and transforms; they revive what was once frozen. They summon the memory and history of painting, while allowing it to decay, to regenerate itself.

Through these gestures emerges a meditation on life and death, on the loss of control and the trust placed in matter. Painting becomes an experience of metamorphosis, a dialogue between the living and the inanimate.

Alongside these paintings, a series of sculptures questions the very temporality of matter. Made of rocher sugar, they carry within them the apparent fragility of suspended time. Yet beneath their crystalline surface, chemistry has reversed itself: sweetness has become resistance. Sugar, often seen as ephemeral, here becomes a noble, enduring, almost timeless material.

“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”
— Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907)

The Factory’s AIR program aims to host up to 6 artists from across the world every year. Selected artists are provided stipends for room & board, food, and art supplies so they can spend their time focusing on their creative practice. At the end of each residency each artist hosts an exhibition in the Factory’s event space and invites the community to join as we celebrate their developing bodies of work.

Learn More About Our AIR Program Here

Also check out other Arts events in Manchester, Fine Arts events in Manchester, Exhibitions in Manchester.