Koss

In her artistic approach, KOSS embraces the emancipation of reality. She notably adapts to her practice the Japanese technique of Shou Sugi Ban, which consists of burning the surface of wood. This ancestral process, originally meant to protect the material, reveals through combustion a singular beauty: veins, scars, the luminous depth of black. “As in nature, I look for irregularity, for asymmetry that makes the work unique,” the artist confides. The aging body, the altering material, become under her hands sensitive metaphors.

Her work is traversed by the presence of the four elements: fire, water, air, earth. By oxidizing steel with seawater collected directly from the beaches of her region, KOSS initiates a slow alchemy. The steel erodes, catches light, transforms itself. This natural chemical reaction becomes a mirror of passing time, of skin that marks, of the metamorphoses of the human being.

KOSS questions contemporary humanity: its imbalances, its loneliness, its drifts. Her work Big Mouth, for instance, evokes the saturation of speech, the erasure of the gaze, the disappearance of listening. The modern human appears eroded, isolated, fragmented. Yet from this decomposition remains a form of energy, a light, a trace. A living work.

Karen Ossona thus creates pieces in which material and message merge. Each work becomes a space for reflection, a raw poem, an invitation to feel. Her path reveals an artist who is free, instinctive, and deeply committed to a vision of the world that is both organic and poetic.