Arts — sculpture, lamps, painting

Every piece is one piece. There is no second one.

Works are made from what the Pacific delivers, so nothing repeats. Each is available by inquiry — send the title on WhatsApp and I will reply with full photographs, dimensions, condition and shipping options to Costa Rica or abroad.

Sculpture — reclaimed driftwood, lacquer · Lamps — functional art, wired to your standard · Painting — acrylic and lacquer on linen

Sculpture

Ola Seca

A single trunk found after a September swell at Playa Negra. The outer grey is left exactly as the sea returned it; the split face is sanded to glass and lacquered marine blue, so the piece reads as raw driftwood from one side and as pure colour from the other.

Reclaimed Pacific driftwood, marine lacquer · 210 × 60 × 45 cm · 2025

Lamp

Faro

A lamp that stands like a small mast. The limb keeps its worm channels and salt bleaching; the brass hardware and parchment shade are the only new materials, kept deliberately plain so the wood does the speaking.

Reclaimed teak, brass, parchment shade · 162 cm high · 2025

Painting

Punto de Quiebre

Painted from memory of the same break, at the same hour, over three months. Acrylic laid flat, then a glossy lacquer pour across the lower third — the shine holds the light the way water does at seven in the morning.

Acrylic and lacquer on linen · 150 × 120 cm · 2026

LAMP

Marea

Forty-one slats from eleven different pieces of driftwood, graded by weathering rather than by size. Half the field is lacquered; the tide line where colour stops is the whole composition.

Driftwood relief, marine lacquer on oak backing · 140 × 90 cm · 2026

SCULPTURE

Line-up

Drawn in one sitting, one line per figure, no lifting of the pen. The subject is waiting rather than riding — the part of surfing that actually takes up the morning.

Ink on cotton paper · 50 × 40 cm, framed in oak · 2024

PAINTING

Casa Blanca

A study of the house that became Villa Pi.Casa, drawn before anything was demolished. Graphite on heavy paper, the palms indicated only where they would eventually shade the terrace.

Graphite on heavy paper · 70 × 50 cm, framed · 2023

Lamp

Corriente

A dining pendant, 1.8 metres of beam recovered from an old fishing dock. Three linen shades hang at unequal intervals, set to the rhythm of the beam’s own splits rather than to a grid.

Reclaimed dock beam, blackened steel, linen · 180 cm wide · 2026

LAMP

Verde Alto

The interior of the forest behind the studio in the ten minutes before rain, when the greens go fluorescent. One black vertical, lacquered, for the trunk you walk into.

Acrylic and lacquer on linen · 180 × 100 cm · 2025

Artist statement

On working with what the ocean has already finished

I spent twenty years making objects that had to be perfect on the first attempt — bags, small leather goods, runway accessories for houses where a millimetre was a decision. That training does not leave you. What changed, after I moved from Paris to Costa Rica, is what I point it at.

Driftwood arrives already authored. Ten or fifteen years in salt water removes everything soft and leaves a structure no one designed: worm channels, bleached grain, a fracture that follows the fibre rather than the saw. My job is not to improve that. It is to decide where my hand should start and, more importantly, where it should stop.

So most pieces hold two states at once. One face stays exactly as it washed up, grey and open. The other is sanded through eight grades and lacquered — marine blue, forest green, occasionally black — until it reflects the room like water.
The contrast is the subject: raw nature against a finish borrowed from the luxury workshop, tropical light against a colour deep enough to hold it.

Why nothing is editioned

Reclaimed material forbids repetition, and I have stopped seeing that as a limitation. A lamp exists because one particular beam came off one particular dock. If you want that piece, it is that piece. This is also why there are no prices here and no cart: placing a work means talking about the wall, the ceiling height, the direction of your light and how the thing will be shipped. That conversation is part of the work.

Themes I keep returning to

The ocean and surfing culture, because they set the rhythm of the day here. Tropical light, because it is violent at noon and generous at six. Modern architecture, from a decade of drawing houses I could not yet build. And sustainability, not as a claim but as a method — every material in these works had a previous life, and the only new things I buy are hardware, lacquer and linen.

“A piece is finished when I can no longer tell which part the sea made and which part I made — and I stop one step before that.”

Pierre-Yves Labey, studio notes, 2026

Acquisition

Ask about a piece. It takes one message.

Tell me which title caught you, or describe the space you are furnishing. Commissions from a specific piece of wood are also possible — those run eight to twelve weeks.