69e Salon de Montrouge

Based in Roubaix, where he lives and works in a former Poor Clares monastery, Thomas Moësl develops a practice in which radical asceticism shapes every gesture. Supported by La Malterie Arts Visuels in Lille, he builds a demanding body of work in which sound, sculpture and ceramics intertwine to compose a perceptual cosmology. His almost monastic severity gives his approach a rare intensity: he brings the discipline of the researcher into contact with the vision of the mystic, in a constant dialogue between science and incantation, rationality and ritual.

Trained at ISBA Besançon, Moësl creates immersive environments in which sonic vibration becomes matter. From Vita contemplativa to Zone blanche, from Genesis II.0 to Ornement, toy et lien divin, his installations immerse the viewer in experiences that engage both body and imagination. Here, sound is more than hearing: it constructs space, shapes a relationship with time and transforms perception into a state of consciousness. Ceramics play an essential role in this research. Used as resonators, amplifiers or sound modules, they also assert themselves as visual, ritual and sculptural objects. Through this dual functional and aesthetic status, shaped clay becomes a partner to sound, materialising the connection between the density of matter and the immateriality of vibration.

Moësl’s universe is also rooted in a precise stylistic lineage: Gothic architecture and decorative art. His arrangements echo vertical architectures, networks and ornamental systems assembled from motifs. This formal dimension extends beyond aesthetic quotation: it provides a way of thinking about how sound and matter unfold as invisible architectures made of layers and resonances.

He also belongs to a generation of post-internet artists. His works exist in a context shaped by the continuous circulation of images and sounds on social media and by hybrid modes of reception. Moësl connects this digital logic with physical, immersive experiences. This dual grounding allows him to link online culture with forms perceived in space, extending digital dissemination through embodied arrangements.

His residencies and collaborations, from Dunkirk to Paris and from Besançon to Roubaix, reveal a desire to create shared, collective spaces that remain permeated by his characteristic radical discipline. This productive tension between austerity and openness, withdrawal and immersion, underlies the originality of his approach.

Thomas Moësl’s work thus connects the speculative and the organic, the Gothic and the ultra-contemporary, the materiality of ceramics and the immateriality of sound. It sketches a map of perception in which art becomes a lived cosmology: a world of resonances that questions our certainties and opens the imagination.

Text by Henri Van Melles