Belmonte Gallery presents the exhibition ‘Dialogue sur fils de cuivre’ until September 20 at its gallery in Madrid’s Carabanchel neighborhood. A dialogue on copper threads, marking the first collaborative exhibition between Marie Hazard and Augusta Lardy Micheli. Two artists in flow, whose conversation resonates deeply.
Marie Hazard and Augusta Lardy share a conceptual depth that intertwines naturally, despite the distinct nature of their works. Their friendship began in a workshop in Paris and later deepened during a residency in Mexico City. This bond evolved into a collaboration that transcends friendship, becoming a visual and material conversation.
That conversation takes shape in Dialogue sur fils de cuivre, an exhibition curated by Gema Melgar that can be visited until September 20, 2025, at Galería Belmonte, in Madrid’s Carabanchel district. The project was born from their connection, forged through long calls, WhatsApp exchanges, images, and thoughts seeking a common thread. They found it in copper—a living, changing material that reflects the essence of their dialogue.
Here, paintings float like suspended fabrics, and textiles rise like paintings in the air. The exhibition unfolds like a forest where visitors can walk through, discovering front and back sides, as in the art of weaving—one cannot exist without the other. Like copper, their works transform, oxidize, shine. Together, they find new ways to speak, to hold, to create.
MARIE HAZARD
In works like Chambre à Air Paco, your textile training merges with the unsettling presence of used bicycle inner tubes, creating a striking juxtaposition between the delicate and the grotesque. What draws you to this contrast?
I didn’t intentionally seek out a contrast. In 2016, while still studying, I decided to weave using urban materials I found around me. I started with twigs, cotton threads, and later had the chance to work with copper warp threads. Copper is a flexible and malleable material that allows textiles to take on a sculptural dimension. In London, I came across used bicycle inner tubes and decided to integrate them with copper. The fabrics evolved into sculptures, and I rediscovered the grid pattern—a traditional tool used by weavers to design their motifs. I used oil paint applied with a stick to link the support and surface of the fabric.
Now I’ve returned to those fabrics. I want to continue making sculpture, and copper allows me to shape forms and capture light. It creates an interesting dialogue with the recycled, urban rubber of the tires. The French term chambre à air also means “air room,” and that double meaning resonates in my weavings: air and space also play a central role.
How do you manage the balance between traditional craftsmanship and technological or industrial elements?
Weaving is a learning process. I like using this simple phrase because it says everything about the technique, which can be very complex when working with different types of threads. By incorporating digital prints of my own drawings and texts, the fabric opens up to experimentation.
I also blend eras, maintaining traditional methods while integrating industrial knowledge. One of my key references has been Daniel Arasse, who urged us to look closely, to see details and techniques—something rarely done nowadays. Most people no longer read or observe. Lack of time? Lack of interest? Our era is disappearing before our eyes. What truly resonates with me is Arasse’s phrase: “On n’y voit rien” (“We don’t see anything”), a reaction to how Art History failed to decipher the paintings of the great masters.
In weaving, I see the same desire to look closely, to question techniques and practical aspects—because we’ve lost that knowledge. For me, returning to technique rather than technology is essential, at least for now.
Your art is notably versatile—you’ve worked with photography, painting, literature, among other media. Is there something that remains constant regardless of medium or where your work is shown?
For me, weaving encompasses everything.
Besides the Chambre à Air series, many of your other works, like Las Flores, radiate delicacy and a direct connection to your textile roots, without contrasts. Is this change intentional, do you aim to convey a specific message, or is it purely intuitive?
Yes, one could say it brings me back to my textile roots. I like that word—“roots.”
It was while walking through Magdalena Abakanowicz’s woven sculpture forest—the Abakans—at Tate Modern that I felt the need to return to intimacy. It all started with the copper feet: they connect us to the earth and are the part of the body that touches the loom. They’re deeply symbolic. The use of copper wire crocheted marked a new vocabulary in my work. I don’t think it was either intentional or intuitive, and the copper fragments appeared at a time when I needed to materialize my surroundings.
Las Flores connects to the flowers in my studio. Two years ago, after my father’s death, two friends brought me a flowerpot and said: “These are flowers that never die.”
You’ve mentioned artistic influences like Anni Albers. Are there other sources of inspiration, perhaps from daily life or outside the traditional art world, that have influenced your work? If so, how?
I feel like a child still learning. I’m inspired by people and I love watching them. Especially young people. They’re a politically, ecologically, and socially engaged generation in a world where capitalism and consumerism continue to harm minorities and the most vulnerable. We need to share more of that spirit.
Josef and Anni Albers had that vision. They played a key role in shaping post-war art and design by encouraging dialogue and collaboration in their workshops. They constantly explored new materials and rethought design through experimentation, conversation, and creative exchange. They are a reference I find deeply inspiring.
AUGUSTA LARDY
Your piece La Source Coule Sous la Morraine feels both concrete and elusive, between abstraction and figuration. You’ve described your work as existing between those two realms, and also beyond them. How do you approach creating images that carry this duality?
For me, painting is a dance between prior intentions and the bodily discovery of the image through the act of making. La source coule sous la moraine was a painting that was somehow already in my mind, and came from a need to express a lived situation with a sort of cathartic urgency in the moment of making it.
I painted it in a single day. Painting quickly is a way to get to the essence of what needs to be expressed. This translates into firmness of gesture… something like a constructed drawing. I think of all my paintings as figurations or representations of an intent in which abstraction is resolved through language. I don’t think there’s a duality in painting this way—it’s more of a symbiosis between the flow of expressiveness and the degree of narration one chooses.
When I made this painting, I was going through a difficult time. My neighbors were illegally restricting my access to water. I lived in fear of the faucets. This caused a lot of anger, but also allowed me to personally experience my interest in the Anthropocene and how natural resources are being controlled by humans. Water that was meant to flow couldn’t because of human intervention. I had a dream in which the water spoke to me from above and below the earth beneath my house… It told me it was a melted, ancient glacier destined to flow between the rocks underground.
That dream led to the urgency of painting that source trapped in barbed wire… It was a way to cope, to resist, to rebel.
In your work, each element seems intentional and emotionally charged. Could you walk us through your creative process? What usually comes first: the idea, the color, the meaning…? Ultimately, what drives you to paint what you paint?
The urge to create comes from many places… intuitive visions, studio trials, compositions developed over time… Everything is valid! It’s about having an “aha” moment. In the end, there’s always an impulse, a voice that needs to come out.
I see images behind my eyelids, when I dream, and during moments of stillness throughout the day. They flow for a while and act as portals for new works. The language of painting always ends up taking control over those initial visions. People often tell me that painting is done in solitude, but I have my brushes, my paints, my oils, and they all talk—and sometimes shout—on the canvas. Each medium has a voice and dictates where the work will go. A painting is a painting before it is an image.
In the end, everything that remains visible is there intentionally; I choose to keep it rather than veil it, and my work is the sum of many accidents. Painting is the result of thousands of decisions, even the most intuitive ones. You have to be brave, paint without looking back, and work towards what the painting truly needs.
You’ve spoken about how a composition can exist before becoming a physical object, and how feelings or objects can evolve more abstractly or metaphysically. How do these ideas influence your work?
I’m interested in the evolution of objects through time and space—that is, the endurance or persistence of their parts as years pass.
How many parts can be added or removed before an object loses its essence?
That brings up another question: how many parts of a painting can I remove until only its essence remains? I often answer this at the end of a work, subtracting from the composition to reach what it really wants to say. All superfluous elements must disappear.
Where are the glaciers that no longer exist? Can they only live on the surface of paintings? What new flora and fauna will inhabit these renewed landscapes?
My paintings attempt to capture those fragments of time.
We often see in art that materials gain meaning in and of themselves. That seems to be the case in Rest Darling and Think of Me. What led you to work with that particular combination of media?
Copper is a living material, and that’s the main reason it’s at the center of the exhibition alongside Marie. It lives and evolves, just like our conversations.
Copper entered my work through printmaking. Etchings are visual and geographic testimonies in my pieces about glaciers that no longer exist. To make a print, you need a copper plate as a base. I find it beautiful how that plate evolves, degrades over time, just like the landscapes evoked in the printed paper…
In the Rest My Darling and Think of Me series, I interpret printmaking in my own way. These are etched, oxidized, painted copper plates on which I apply a UV-printed photograph on transparency. These works are fated to change, as the copper will oxidize… The subject and the object merge in their physical fate. In this case, I overlaid images of a fountain I photographed in Mexico, the winter I met Marie, onto copper that I had oxidized for a few days in a fountain near my studio.
Marie uses stamping on her fabrics. I like linking our works that way. We photograph many things in our daily lives, and images gain value on their own—not as compositions to be imitated in paintings or weavings. Printing techniques allow us to integrate photography into our respective works.
You have a clear and reflective perspective on both art and the world around you. Have there been key influences—people or experiences—that have shaped you as a person and as an artist?
Since childhood, I’ve felt very connected to a world of visions that come from the interconnectedness in nature. One of my grandmothers is Swedish and told me stories about creatures living among berries, moss, stones, and streams. I still maintain that wonder for the small marvels of the natural world.
My other grandmother lives on a hill overlooking Lake Geneva, facing a large mountain range. In the summer, I would watch the mountains lose more and more snow… I think that was my first conscious experience of climate change and humanity’s impact on the landscape. It made me deeply sad, and over time I gathered a small collection of 19th-century engravings of Alpine glaciers. Most of those glaciers have long since melted. This has become a major archival reference in my work as a painter.
And from any philosophical theory?
My worldview has also been shaped by the work of Jean-Paul Sartre. Existentialism is a Humanism opened a way of facing life, and helped me become aware of my own existence. Sartre says: “Don’t be a coward”; my art school professors would say: “Be brave.” That is the key ingredient for painting.
What is your creative process like?
I let my inner world grow through hours of silence and contemplation. Boredom is key to creativity. Since I was a child, I’ve allowed myself plenty of time to daydream, refusing to be productive all the time. What I’ve read and studied is also present during the creative process… Concepts appear, and I trust the language of materials.
Which artists are part of your imaginary?
The painters I admire are those whose work inspires me to paint: Cecily Brown, Félix Vallotton, Ellsworth Kelly, Léon Spilliaert, Yoko Matsumoto, Jay DeFeo, Rothko, Munch, Hodler…
