Galleries in Paris

This new exhibition by Clémence van Lunen presents a new aspect of her work, featuring kingfishers, flower pots and curtains. The first thing you need to know about Clémence van Lunen’s work is that she’s a real magician. With each of her new series, each of her chosen themes, she manages to sculpt reality, to give flesh in the truest sense of the word to her works, breathing life into them with an exceptional mastery of volume.

Clémence van Lunen is passionate about technique and the possibilities offered by the material, which she successfully pushes to the limits of balance. The artist engages in a real choreography with the medium, leaving hand or arm prints on the rough or enamelled surfaces of the work, like the remains of a performance.
Transgressing the traditional forms of sculpture, Van Lunen handles her clay with dexterity and technical savoir-faire. As with each of her new series, these compositions defy all academic proportions, thanks to the many areas of raw clay left exposed in the firing process.
Ever since her earliest works, the artist has had a passion for the so-called popular arts, and these old-fashioned, anodyne or functional forms have inspired her to seek out and sublimate that which escapes tradition by enhancing it. In this new series, she succeeds in magnifying the movement of a kingfisher that flies out of a flowerpot or lands on it, or the simple fall of a curtain that opens and closes. She uses sculpture to highlight these gestures, these actions, these everyday objects.

Although form precedes subject in his work, the artist never separates form from texture. One draws the other, and the other can be seen before the first. For Clémence van Lunen, it’s not a question of simply representing reality, but of transcending it.
In this latest part of the Curtains series, and her presentation of the first Kingfishers, Van Lunen continues to reveal the intense pleasure she takes in modelling these voluptuous, exuberant forms.  While retaining her playfulness, but also her freedom as an artist, she brings out subjects and forms where we, as viewers, least expect them.

Clémence Van Lunen’s glazes are also applied with great freedom, contrasting and twirling on and around the ceramics, avoiding correct tones and avoiding the decorative.  But what might seem casual is, in fact, just a great ability to see and understand how a work of art is going to be built up, a work that will continue to change as we look at it. You have to admire the kingfishers, flying through the curtains, emerging from the flowerpots, seeming to give us a mischievous look at the incongruity of their presence in these plantations. You have to look at the multitude of details in the pleats, underwires, cords and stripes to understand and appreciate the enjoyment of creating. Having worked with ceramics as a medium for 20 years, at a time when it was not yet considered a ‘noble’ art by young artists, Clémence van Lunen continues to expand the field of possibilities, much to our delight.