Marc Feulien (Courcelles 1943)

Marc Feulien is professor of ceramics at the Académie des Beaux-Arts (Fine Arts Academy) of Charleroi. He was first acknowledged as an artist in the early seventies. As starting point for his works, he uses the intrinsic qualities of the materials that he chooses to work with. Terracotta is one that he excels in of course, but there is also mercury, granite, glass, concrete, zinc leaf appliqué on paper or cast iron. Another artist, Daniel Fauville (1953) also uses materials as a reference to the industrial history of the region.

Using these many different materials, Feulien communicates to the onlooker the wide range of tactile sensations scattered throughout nature or generated by man and quickly forgotten. It is not Feulien's intention to draw the attention of the viewer to the techniques alongside these characteristics. His work feeds off a recurrence of squares and cubes, geometric figures set up as the archetypes of his artistic approach.

Marc Feulien is also one of the rare artists to have found a solution to the problem of integrating a work into an architectural body. In his case, we would refer to it as a gestation of sculptures starting from fundamental figures inherent in the initial reason for architecture. The work is born from the place and is in quasi-chromosomal" relation to it. The sculpture standing out from the entrance of the Regional Cultural Centre of Charleroi testifies to this specific style.