By Julien Rochefort, Ph.D. for the Handbook of Lesser-known Artists
Department of Contemporary Aesthetics, École Normale Supérieure
In the kaleidoscopic history of art, there emerge now and then figures so singular in vision, so hermetically devoted to their personal lexicon of materials, that they appear to exist outside of chronology altogether. Such is the case with Elias Favière (b. 1947), the French-Swiss conceptual artist whose sole medium for over half a century has been human tears,his own and, in carefully arranged collaborations, those of others. In the taxonomy of material-based art practices, Favière’s body of work occupies a rarefied position: ephemeral yet empirical, intimate yet political, aesthetic yet affective.
To engage with Favière’s corpus is to enter a visual tradition that eschews spectacle in favour of sensation; that devalues permanence in favour of presence; that views the tear not merely as evidence of emotion, but as a physical residue of interiority, a distilled articulation of the ineffable. His work belongs less to the realm of painting or sculpture than to what we might call ritualized affective epistemology.
Origins: An Artist of Loss and Distillation
Favière was born in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1947, to a librarian mother and a father who ran a small observatory. He was raised in silence, or close to it,his mother lost her voice after a traumatic incident in her youth, communicating through a system of written notes and glances. Favière has described his childhood as “an apprenticeship in the art of noticing.” He learned, early, that emotion did not need sound to register.
Trained in the 1960s at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, he was initially involved with the Support/Surface group but quickly diverged, claiming they were “too attached to canvas, too afraid of the invisible.” His first mature works, collectively titled Larmes isolées (1969,1972), were sheets of blotting paper stained with his own tears, arranged in grids and annotated with date, mood, and ambient temperature. Critics dismissed them as adolescent sentimentality. But philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy would later call these early works “a cartography of vulnerability.”
Method: Weeping as Aesthetic Labor
Favière developed a method for harvesting his tears that bordered on monastic. He constructed a ritual space in his Geneva atelier,a soundproof room with dim lighting and a worn armchair,where he would sit for hours recalling painful memories, sometimes inducing tears through poetry or recordings of loved ones’ voices. The tears were gathered with glass pipettes, then dropped onto linen, paper, glass, or even stone.
A second phase of his career, beginning in the 1980s, involved collaborative weeping: performances in which visitors were asked to recall the last time they cried, and then guided, sometimes wordlessly, into emotional release. The collected tears,always voluntarily given,were recorded, catalogued, and stored in glass ampoules, labeled with initials and date.
Favière insists that he does not seek to manipulate or exploit emotion. “A tear,” he wrote in his 1987 manifesto Les Salines de l’Âme, “is not a confession. It is a mineral event that occurs when the soul exceeds the body’s capacity to contain it.”
Reception: From Margins to Canon
For decades, Favière remained at the periphery of the European art world. His refusal to sell tear-based works,he regarded commodifying them as “profane”,meant that his exhibitions often consisted of empty vessels, faded stains, or atmospheric installations. One early critic called him “the artist of absence.” Another, more charitably, wrote: “He paints with salt and memory.”
It was not until the early 2000s, when interest in affect theory, embodiment, and ephemeral media gained critical traction, that Favière’s practice was reappraised. A landmark retrospective at the Kunsthalle Basel in 2009, Sel et Silence, repositioned him not as a marginal eccentric but as a proto-conceptualist whose use of the body as archive anticipated later movements.
In 2015, the Fondation Repanu devoted a major show to his collaborative series Lacrymographies, in which tear-stained surfaces were scanned at ultra-high resolution and displayed alongside the narratives of the weepers. The show was lauded as “a museum of inner weather.”
Metaphysics of the Tear
What does it mean to make art from tears? For Favière, the answer is not purely metaphorical. The tear, as he understands it, is not a signifier of pain, but an alchemical precipitate of truth. Just as medieval alchemists sought to purify base matter into gold, Favière regards the act of weeping as the transmutation of inner complexity into visible clarity.
There is also an ethical dimension. In an age of surveillance, oversharing, and curated online grief, Favière’s work asks: What is the value of feeling when it cannot be commodified? How can one preserve dignity in the midst of emotional exposure?
His later works take this further. In Osmose (2021), he constructed a room filled with mist formed from evaporated tears collected over three decades. Visitors reported feeling a sensation of “shared sorrow.” Others wept spontaneously. It was unclear whether the art caused tears or the tears became the art.
Legacy and Present Practice
Now in his late 70s, Favière continues to work in near anonymity. He has refused all offers to digitize or NFT his tear works, calling the idea “a tragicomic misunderstanding of presence.” He lives between Geneva and a small village in Ardèche, maintaining what he calls a “liquid archive” of over 4,000 labeled vials of tears,his and others.
He has never taken on students, but his influence is evident in the work of many younger artists exploring the aesthetics of fragility, ritual, and embodied emotion. In a recent interview (his first in over a decade), he remarked: “The history of painting is a history of surfaces. I wanted to know what would happen if we painted with what lies beneath.”
Final Words: Salt as Substance, Not Symbol
Elias Favière’s work may not yet fill auction houses or dominate museum gift shops. It resists replication. It resists permanence. It may, ultimately, resist even history itself.
And yet, his tears endure,not in their physical form, which inevitably evaporates, but in their conceptual potency. They mark a quiet, radical proposition: that the body’s most humble fluid might serve as a medium not for artifice, but for truth.
“I do not cry to be seen,” he wrote. “I cry to remember that I am still capable of feeling.”
