Gaelle Warner
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Aug 12
- 3 min read
Gaelle S. Warner is a Paris-based artist working with collage through photography. Her process begins with walking, observing, and collecting images from everyday surroundings. Using her own photographs, she cuts and arranges fragments into structured compositions where architectural repetition meets small visual shifts. The grid plays a central role, not as a fixed system but as a surface for dissonance and rhythm. In works like “Roujan,” “Est” or “Fissure,” she connects places like Marseille, Sète or Sydney into new visual territories. The result is both precise and open, reflecting on memory, urban transformation, and the overlooked poetry of ordinary spaces.
Q: When did collage start to feel like the right way to work with your ideas—was there a clear moment, or did it just slowly take over?
A: I started doing collages when I was a teenager, influenced by the work of Braque and Picasso I saw one day in a museum. Cutting pictures in fashion magazines at first and gluing them together. I pursued the technique long after, until I decided to use my own photos. Around 2010, as I wandered around Rome, I took architectural photos that I printed and cut into small squares. At the time, I arranged them on a canvas painted in black. The result was bold and intriguing. That was the start of the series "Découpages Urbains."
Q: What keeps you coming back to repetition and grids? Is it a way to bring order, or more about rhythm and flow?
A: The grid looks like a map of an American city. I lived in Los Angeles and New York for many years. So, I guess this is a sort of an homage. The grid also resembles a building lit at night. In some of my collages I deliberately introduce a visual accident, breaking the possible monotony of a perfect geometry. The imperfection becoming a means of engagement, a way of deconstructing the boredom of a too-smooth world and maintaining a poetic dimension in the perception.
Q: In works like "Fissure" and "Est", you bring together pieces from very different places. How do you know when images click?
A: In most of my work, I like to bring the world together. Tokyo meets L.A. or Madrid, Brussels mixes with Melbourne or Djerba, Paris brushes with Hong Kong. It creates an imaginary territory where everything seems possible, where limits are extended and options are wider. I guess the images click when the story they tell is compelling and invites emotions.
Q: You talk about memory and place—are there certain memories or spots that keep showing up in your process?
A: Places of my childhood pop up now and then. My souvenirs weaved into a patchwork that allowed me to link different moments with different places. When I was three, my family moved to North Africa and upon my return to France, my memory crumbled into “incoherent” fragments, inviting images of palm trees into the grey streets of rainy Brittany. This is probably why I like collages as a form of expression. It allows me to revisit places that are geographically disconnected while very much part of my imagination.
Q: "Roujan" includes gas stations, barns, facades—really ordinary spaces. What do you look for in the everyday?
A: My collages are composed of photos of architectural details that are usually considered secondary or of little aesthetic value: electrical poles, signs, peeling walls, details of a façade, buildings under construction. Ordinary spaces. Putting these fragments together helps form a poetic perspective to convey the fragility and transformation at work in our urban space. And maybe to help us see beauty in the mundane.
Q: How did your time at Galerie Réservoir shift the way you see cities or think about fragmentation?
A: During my two-month residency at the Galerie Réservoir, I collected images that became the raw material for my portraits of the city of Sète. As I wandered through the city, I captured its lines, volumes and, above all, its architecture to grasp the territory. Each neighbourhood seems to carry within it a polarity.
Streets becoming thresholds, zones of passage between contiguous but dissimilar worlds. Le Barou, le Mont Saint-Clair, la Corniche, l’Île de Thau or le Quartier Haut are places laden with implicit political, economic and social narratives: fishermen's cottages, opulent pavilions, blocks of flats or senior citizens' residences. It is in this tension that I worked: between the image and its reverse, between visible forms and the invisible structures they suggest. Each photograph thus becoming a double gaze—document and interpretation, trace and fantasy.
