At Galerie Mira in Nantes, Barreau Charbonnet carves Les Rhizopodes, solid timber blocks cut in blunt brutalist slabs and grooved with cell-biology motifs that glow in the dark.
Barreau Charbonnet works out of Nantes, where Nicolas Barreau and Jules Charbonnet, both born in the city in 1986, set up the studio in 2011. They met after spells in the studios of Encore Heureux and Construire, in scenography and in construction, and they describe what they do plainly: designers and builders, making objects and installations that are useful, symbolic and worth sitting with. Les Rhizopodes belongs to Abstral Claustra, a June 2026 show at Galerie Mira staged alongside Super Terrain, where painting and carved wood are set opposite each other to see what one can say to the other.
The title does the explaining. Rhizopods are single-celled organisms that travel by pushing their own body outward, extending pseudopods, false feet, to move and to feed. That biology runs across every surface here. To answer the abyssal landscapes in Super Terrain's paintings, the carved figures borrow from the cell: radiating suns, spirals, eyes, segmented crawling things, membranes that split and pool. It reads as folklore until you notice it is a microscope slide.
Each piece starts as a solid block of timber, cut in a blunt, brutalist manner and left heavy. Stools stand on staggered legs that step out from the seat like the feet the title names; low benches rest on stacked plinths; one work climbs into a vertical totem of shifting blocks. The wood keeps its deep grain and a dark, near-scorched finish, so the surface already carries movement before a single line is cut.
The bas-relief is grooved by hand into that grain, then read two ways. On some pieces the channels stay bare, catching light along a pale edge of raw wood. On others they are flooded with pigment that holds the light and glows, green, red, yellow, violet, so a stool photographed in the dim of the workshop turns into a lit diagram of itself. Up close the line is fat and unhurried, more drawn than engineered, which keeps the whole thing warm rather than clinical.
The same cutting was then turned on a set of frames built to hold Super Terrain's canvases, so the furniture and the painting end up speaking one carved language. That is the argument underneath Les Rhizopodes: objects made by the people who designed them, in solid wood, for one specific room, where a stool can carry as much thinking as the picture on the wall.
