Artists

Since 2010, French artist Sylvie Ursulet has transformed cardboard into a powerful and expressive artistic medium. Working entirely by hand, Ursulet molds, cuts, and layers the material into sculptural forms that oscillate between painting and sculpture, low relief and high relief. Her process redefines cardboard as more than a utilitarian or disposable substance, revealing its flexibility, resilience, and poetic range.

Her figures, furniture-like objects, and abstract compositions are brought to life through meticulous experimentation with texture and light. Depending on how illumination falls across the surfaces, expressions shift and objects seem to transform, imbuing the works with an uncanny, almost mercurial quality. Transparency and opacity, rigidity and fragility, permanence and impermanence are held in delicate tension.

Cardboard, which Ursulet describes as a “chameleon material,” allows her to play with perception and push the limits of how objects are seen in space. She creates works that challenge assumptions about functionality and permanence, with armchairs and chairs that resemble furniture but exist primarily as sculptural explorations.

By elevating a humble material into complex, expressive works, Ursulet crafts an art that is at once technical and imaginative, reflective and playful—a meditation on transformation and the boundaries between art and life.