ABOUT

Samson Penot (born in 1984 in Paris) lives and works in Bayonne, in the Basque Country.
He develops a sculptural practice centered on wood, which he carves, sands and polishes to create bas-reliefs, wall-mounted sculptures and freestanding forms. His works explore the memory contained in matter and erosion as a metaphor for time, presenting each piece as the trace of a memory in the process of forming.

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Coming from a family of artists, he first turned to music. After his studies, he travelled for six years around the world before returning to musical composition.
For more than thirteen years, he composed and produced a dozen albums for Kosinus and Universal Music in the field of production music.
Alongside this, he began working with wood and marquetry in his workshop in the Cévennes. Material experimentation, first applied to objects and lighting, opened up a broader reflection on volume, matter and space. This period was accompanied by Jungian analytical work that helped shape his approach to transformation, notably by considering time as a thickness, a lived space, a phenomenon that builds itself rather than a chronological marker.

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In 2021, he left the musical field and undertook a two-year solo journey on his sailboat, between La Rochelle and Belle-Île. This experience marked a turning point and definitively shaped his sculptural practice.

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Since then, based in Bayonne, he has devoted his work to sculpture. His series, Galets and INS//TEMPS, examine the action of time and the elements on matter, and how this transformation resonates with our own lives.

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Represented by Galerie Sophie Leiser in Biarritz, his work has been shown in galleries and cultural events in France, including Cinéma Le Royal in Biarritz (rooftop, 2024) with Con7store Art Gallery.