Loup Sarion

First thing when I wake up is to make a little coffee and play the news on the radio. It can be quite brutal to hear some darker realities of the world while my eyes are still half closed, but somehow it feels right to hear about this troubled planet.

Then, when I’m lucky enough, I can go back to bed with my coffee… so there is this strange balance between deep intimacy of a protective bubble mixed with the distant noise of the world.

I grind my coffee beans with a simple manual grinder. It takes some real effort, so by the end I feel like I deserve it. Then I fill up my Italian coffee maker and listen carefully to the sound of the water pressure building up, with one ear still on the news and one ear on the coffee that’s about to boil (by then, the news might have slipped into the weather forecast or the sports section which I care very little about). Then I drink my coffee in a ceramic cup I made, and somehow I never get bored of it.

The ideal morning, summer or winter, anywhere on this planet, is when a lover is still in my bed, I get up to make the coffee, skip the news, and return with two cups… these mornings have their own suspended taste.

We could see it as multiple subjects within one long conversation.

The various materials I use also reflect on the architecture of my studio, which is divided in three different rooms. One room might be for ceramics, one room is open to a patio where I can weld and make these large lamps in the shapes of bones (Marrow Lights), another room is only for sculpture. So, in a practical way they do have separate territories, but in reality they constantly overflow into each other; the gestures, textures and shapes contaminate one another.

At the end, I just make things that feel right for me, and they slowly find their place in the conversation.

Atelier Lips began as a ceramic side practice. I created it with my close friend Charlotte vander Borght, a Belgian artist I admire. We started by making functional objects together in our spare time.

It feels quite separate from our individual practices because there is a sense of utility that makes all these objects humble. They serve a purpose, and they need to create some kind of instant emotion and comfort: in the hand or touching the lips. Simple but genuine.

Recently, Lips returned to the gallery space in the form of a bar, which we activated like an exhibition (or maybe the other way around.) The Lips Bar existed in Brussels with Eden Island in April and May 2026, and before that in Mexico City with Galeria Mascota in 2024.

Found objects and architecture are very natural, immediate ways for us to think about form and shape. Sometimes we are almost just shrinking a building or a fragment of construction into the scale of a vase, a cup, or a lamp.

Brutalist architecture has definitely been a strong inspiration for Lips. We are interested in weight, texture, roughness, and the strange beauty of materials that are not trying too hard to be beautiful.

Every ceramic we make records the surface of the material it’s been casted from, which could be foam, cardboard, leather, fingerprint. There is always a memory of touch within the object.

I love patina.

A lot of my sculptural compositions include objects or at least the shape of them: worn out leather belts, shutters with flaky paint, wooden canes, clothes borrowed from lovers. And all kinds of architectural surfaces: the imprint of the floor from a past studio, or from the gallery floors where I made specific works.

Some of their past lives remain visible in the titles. Skin of Us is like a ghost image of a pair of button-up shirts, made in translucent resin. Corner with Stain is a relief work made of old goat leather found in Mexico City.

And most of the colors in my work seem to come from underneath the surface; it is as if they had been painted multiple times over and over, and the old colors are sweating back through their skin.

James Blake would be somewhere in my morning soundtrack, and probably the last album of Boards of Canada. There is this strange, intoxicating atmosphere to those, like the day is starting but something is still dreaming.

Abraço is a cafe at the center of my life. I love meeting friends there in the morning. The Americano is sublime, the people are elegant and it follows the rhythm of the day—at night, their cocktails are quite flavorful, too.

I like B&H for breakfast and late-night dinner. It’s just a long counter and this place hasn’t changed for decades. And right across the street is the Swiss Institute, which has great exhibitions in one of the rare art centers in the East Village.