October 20, 2026

Interview With Artist Edgar Le Govic

Writing about art and artists is weird because there isn’t a precise technical or mathematical scale to evaluate the work. Of course, in straight forward portraiture or representational formats one can simply score on veracity, but even then, Monet or Stubbs, Vermeer or Canaletto do not simply paint what they see! So, it’s emotional, personal, and subjective when we talk or write about an artist’s work.

When Edgar le Govic’s work was introduced to the Cellotape team our response was immediate, we wished to feature his work, and we wanted to know more about him. My role was simply to ask questions and construct a profile. That profile is what you are reading now, and with his visuals, and our interview, we offer you a glimpse of Edgar and his truly special and fascinating work and its story telling.

Recently Edgar has been doing more interviews and talking about his work, and quotes, observations and thoughts are available for you to read online. I wish mainly to give a personal glimpse into why his work bridges the past, heritage, legends and nature, alongside the future, an oblique way of viewing creativity and why as a young artist, just leaping over his first quarter century, what he has to say in his work is fascinating, but above all beautiful.

The basic facts are that he was born in Vannes in 1999 and now divides his life between Paris and Lorient. This connection to the Brittany coast and its vegetation, plants and natural life, allied to its extraordinarily strong cultural heritage, remain at the heart of his creative work. The Atelier Le Govic develops and sustains connections between three craft traditions and hand made continuums. Textiles, collage, and sculpture are both ageless and timeless but also creative tools that offer endless interpretations and reimagining. Wood, an archival fragment, a woven panel, all require an innate sensitivity to the way the piece moves, can be handled, touched, or shaped. It is not precision and mathematics, it is creative nuance responding to the materials. This has been true for hundreds of years and continues to be so. Nature, form, and memory swirl into a single outcome that relies on the artist to meld them.

Edgar’s artistic world holds his philosophy and inspirations at its heart. In the Flore collection for example the human and botanical forms merge and flow into each other. Through his examination of how botanical imagery can be recorded and analysed through research, including a sketch, digital watercolour, antique prints, and photographs, the textiles preserve the artist’s vision. Threads as the tendrils of a plant, the textile as the moving surface and the fragility of nature held within the fabric. Flowers go through stages from bud to disintegration, as does life, allowing Edgar to evolve and explore the human and the botanical story.

Through folklore and memory the collages and the photographic re and de constructions offer a vision that honours the past, yet reimagines it, or rebuilds and diverts it. Breton cultural memory becomes a material in its own right. Old postcards and portraits, archival photographs fragment into new visions, twisting and turning, vaulting upside down and fanning out into swirling reinventions. Celtic traditions, folk and traditional music, and maritime heritage are all plundered in this visual dance. Edgar trawls the marketplaces such as Saint-Owen or the Passage des Panoramas in Paris, taking each carefully selected piece back to his atelier. “Through repetition, displacement, and composition, he brings the past into a contemporary visual language while keeping its presence visible.” It is all about dreams and visions, stories told, the unexpected and the beautiful, taking the viewer on journeys anchored by the past, nature, and tradition but leading us into new dreams and visions.

So, I close in the hope that if, like the Cellotape team, you are discovering Edgar le Govic for the first time, I hope my words will now encourage you to follow this magical young artist, who through his creative eye invites us to enter his world, and see his vision. I myself see both the John Tennial illustrations for Alice and Wonderland and the music of Eric Satie in Edgar’s work, in other words romance askew, an unexpected beauty and a touch of eccentricity within that beauty, but always a marvellous story.

Words by Tony Glenville

Above: Cueillette Hypnotique by Edgar Le Govic

Cellotape: When did art first enter your life?

Edgar: It has now been about three years since I began developing my artistic practice professionally. Before that, I had always enjoyed making things, creating, and inventing, but I was still searching for my own artistic approach. I never put pressure on myself to find it or set myself a deadline. I simply knew that, at some point, I would find something I genuinely wanted to say. I was searching without really searching, experimenting with different things and different mediums along the way.

The real turning point came when I found my artistic language: representing human thought through floral forms, particularly in my tapestries, while also working with collages made from old postcards and archival photographs. These are now the two main mediums of my practice. Once I had found what I really wanted to do and say, both in terms of style and the ideas I wanted to develop, my practice naturally became professional.

Cellotape: When you were young what things or pieces did you pick up or collect?

Edgar: An example that echoes what I do today is photography. I have always loved old photographs and family archives, which I tended to digitise simply as a way of preserving them, because I was always a little obsessive about photographs and worried about losing one. I can also be quite nostalgic, so I think this desire to preserve and keep images connected quite naturally with my current work with old postcards and archival photographs.

Cellotape: Are there other artists in your family?

Edgar: My grandmother has always loved painting, particularly landscapes and flowers. I remember that she especially liked painting poppies and flowers like that. Although she was not a professional artist, there was already a connection to painting and the botanical world in my family.

Left: Foenicul’Homme, Right; Homme Artichaut, by Edgar Le Govic

Cellotape: When you studied at college, did you have a broad or focused area of interest?

Edgar: I was more interested in taking a broad range of courses rather than focusing on one specific area. I think this is particularly valuable at that stage of life when the goal is to learn and discover as much as possible. I believe that you never do anything for nothing, and that different experiences can always create connections and parallels later on. I particularly enjoyed the general culture courses. We had the opportunity to visit publishing houses such as Éditions du Seuil, theatres, museums, cultural venues such as the Gaîté Lyrique and Le 104 in Paris, as well as places like the Société Générale art collection. We were exposed to a very wide range of cultural environments, and I found that incredibly enriching.

I was therefore really interested in exploring many different subjects and trying as many things as possible. I have to admit, though, that when a project involved more creative work, such as an entrepreneurship project where we had to create something, I sometimes found it frustrating to work as part of a group and not be able to put my own personal touch into it completely.

Cellotape: Your love and manipulation of different elements, when did it start to appear in your work?

Edgar: This idea of combining elements has been present in my practice from the very beginning. I have always enjoyed taking very different elements, bringing them together and seeing what can emerge from their interaction. I really consider myself a visual artist. Above all, I enjoy creating new concepts, and my creative process relies heavily on combining different methods and techniques. I can start with a drawing, a photograph, a flower scan, or an archival image. I like being able to move from one tool to another depending on what I am trying to create.

In my tapestries, this combination can be seen in the relationship between the human silhouette and botanical forms, but also in the use of a very old technique, Jacquard weaving, together with contemporary technologies. With collage, this idea becomes even more direct. I transform existing elements through cutting, collage, duplication, fragmentation, distortion, and repetition. The image can completely change depending on the relationships I create between its different elements.

This is probably what I enjoy most about my practice. I actually have a very long list of things I want to test and experiment with. Whenever I have a new idea or a new technique I want to explore, I write it down, and the list keeps growing. There are always new possibilities I want to try.

Left: Les Remailleuses, Right; Échos Breton, by Edgar Le Govic

Cellotape: The past is embedded in the narrative of your work, is this conscious?

Edgar: Yes, absolutely. In my collage work, the presence of the past is very conscious. It is even part of the rules of the game that I set for myself. I work with old postcards and archival photographs, often connected to Brittany, and I want to preserve their cultural and historical dimension while giving them a more contemporary reading.

One of my rules is to slightly soften the identity of the person represented and make them more anonymous. This allows me to modernise the image while making it easier for each viewer to appropriate it and project their own interpretation onto the scene. When I look at a postcard, I also try to identify what I would call its “points of emotion”: a gesture, a posture, an interaction between two people, or simply a detail that carries a particular emotion. These elements can then become the starting points of my composition. So, the past is not simply something that happens to be present in my work. I consciously use it as a starting point, then transform the image while trying to preserve what makes the original document meaningful.

Cellotape: Interplay between man and nature, even splitting and dividing the body, explain?

Edgar: For me, the human silhouette is one of the most powerful emotional elements that can be represented in art. It is immediately recognisable and creates a strong visual anchor. I, therefore, use simplified, almost abstract silhouettes, with very few details, so that they remain universal and open to interpretation.

I focus particularly on the head, which I see as the place of thought, imagination and transformation. Throughout history, civilisations have emphasised what sits above the human head: pharaohs, Mayans, Aztecs, African headdresses, or Christian halos. This idea of emphasizing and enriching the top of the head is something that strongly informs my work.

In my work, flowers emerge from the skull. They allow me to represent human thought through a living element. I particularly use umbel-shaped flowers because of their very distinctive graphic structures. Their branches create a tension between the stability of the human figure and the expansion of the botanical forms. This is also why the body can sometimes appear fragmented or partially transformed. I am interested in breaking the figure open and allowing the living forms to develop beyond it. The result is a dialogue between the human body and nature, while leaving the viewer with a calm, contemplative image in which they can project their own interpretation.

Cellotape: Textiles, wood, collage and more, but what is your preferred medium?

Edgar: My preferred medium is definitely textile, and more specifically Jacquard tapestry. I approach each work with an engineer’s mindset, where experimentation guides both the thinking and the making. What particularly interests me about Jacquard is that it sits at the intersection of several worlds: an old textile technique, complex mechanics, and contemporary technologies. Understanding the machines, their constraints and their possibilities is therefore an essential part of my practice. I see the loom almost as a new drawing tool. I need to understand its logic in order to use it, reinterpret it, and push its possibilities further.

Many tapestries rely on simple, relatively uniform areas of colour. In my work, the image is instead constructed through the combination of several different threads, which allows me to create finer nuances, values, and transitions. For example, an off-white can be created by combining white, yellow and ecru threads. Seen separately, the threads remain distinct, but from a distance, the eye brings them together and perceives a new colour.

This optical recomposition allows me to translate effects from Chinese ink and water colour into weaving: transparency, fluidity, gradients, and subtle tonal variations. The image is therefore, not simply made of colours placed next to one another. It gradually forms in the viewer’s eye. This also creates a double reading of the work. Up close, you see the material, the threads, and their arrangement. From a distance, they recombine to reveal a fluid, nuanced and almost pictorial image.

For me, the technique is therefore no longer simply a means of execution. It becomes an integral part of the creation of the artwork itself.

Left: Les Gars Du Panier, Right; Brodeuses Multipliées, by Edgar Le Govic

Cellotape: There is a strict control of each piece’s colour palette to your work, is this conscious?

Edgar: Yes, absolutely. It is an extremely deliberate choice. I consider strong contrasts to be essential to the way I approach tapestry. This is why I often place the mineral-like off-white that I use in my work in strong opposition to black. I am very interested in the visual power created by this kind of contrast. I also think about artists such as Kazimir Malevich, who explored very strong contrasts in painting. This kind of visual approach has influenced the way I think about colour in my own tapestries. For me, contrast gives the work its visual strength and helps the silhouettes and botanical forms remain immediately readable. Even when I use many different threads to create subtle nuances and transitions, the overall palette remains extremely controlled.

Cellotape: I would say there is something Proustian to your work, the collages especially, would you agree?

Edgar: Yes, I think there is definitely something Proustian in my collage work. There is a real connection with the past, with old images and a certain nostalgia. But I also want to take a step towards the present by renewing and transforming these images. That is what interests me most: the collage exists somewhere between two worlds, between the memory of the past and a new contemporary reading.

Cellotape: How strong is your place of birth and childhood in your work?

Edgar: It is very strong. I grew up in Brittany, and this gave me a very strong connection with nature. I spent a lot of time by the sea and in the countryside, observing plants, rocks, and coastal landscapes. I think this developed my sensitivity to lines, silhouettes, and organic structures, which are still very present in my work today. Brittany also has a particular atmosphere of calm and contemplation that is important to me. Paris gives me movement, encounters, exhibitions, and visual stimulation, while Brittany gives me more solitude and time to develop my ideas. So even though my artistic career has also been shaped by Paris, Brittany remains deeply rooted in the way I look at the world and in the foundations of my work.

Cellotape: What are your future plans?

Edgar: I’m currently preparing an exhibition planned for January 2027, for which I’m working on four to five new tapestries. I particularly want to take more time to explore materials, textures, and new ways of creating my images. I also want to experiment with different techniques for my work with flowers, including electrical impulses, herbariums, cyanotypes, and thermal cameras. The idea is to observe nature in different ways and see how these experiments can inform my textile work. At the same time, I’d like to develop more site-specific projects in Brittany, working directly with different spaces and their environments. I have quite a lot of ideas I’d like to explore over the coming months.

Left: Hommage Flottant, Right; Cosmos Celtique, by Edgar Le Govic

Cellotape: As you work in your studio, do you welcome commissions, or prefer to simply create?

Edgar: I’m open to commissions, but I don’t want them to completely determine what I create. I think it is important to keep enough freedom to develop my own ideas and continue experimenting. At the same time, I find commissions interesting when they give me the opportunity to explore a new context, a particular space, or a specific subject. They can sometimes push me towards solutions that I would not have explored on my own. So, I would say that I like a balance between developing my own work and being open to projects that allow me to experiment in a different direction.

Cellotape: Any artists from the past you admire or have an affinity with?

Edgar: I’m probably more sensitive to sculpture than to painting. I particularly admire artists such as Zadkine, Brancusi, Henry Moore, and Idel Lanchelevici. I also like very different things in painting and drawing. I’m particularly drawn to Warhol’s sketches and the quality of his lines, while Malevich’s use of strong contrasts also speaks to me.

Cellotape: Your work leads the viewer into a narrative, but it may not be the same as yours, do you mind?

Edgar: Not at all. On the contrary, I think that is one of the fundamental purposes of art. Art should allow people to escape, to imagine and to experience something beyond their own reality. So in no way do I want to decide what that escape should be for the viewer. I can create an image, a visual language, and a starting point, but what each person sees, feels, or imagines belongs entirely to them. For me, that freedom of interpretation is an essential part of the artwork.

Cellotape: Is there anything you’d like to add for the reader about your work?

Edgar: I would simply like to end by sharing my own definition of art, as I think it sums up quite well, the way I see my practice: “For me, art is born from time and reflection. It is intimate, authentic, and remains when everything else disappears.