ENTRACTE

Pioneer of the ceramics’ rebirth in contemporary art, Johan Creten is back with his exhibition named Entracte, his fourth solo show at the Parisian gallery. This exhibition can be considered as a symbolic pause. It’s an invitation to reflection and a way to take a deep breath. With Entracte the artist underlines the importance of beauty in his work, while reaffirming his humanist consciousness and the social and politi-cal resonance of his practice. This exhibition is built as a dialogue with I Peccati, his monographic exhibition at the French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici, from 15 October to 31 January 2021.

“You have already held a fish, haven’t you? It’s slippery. At once pleas-ant and rather disgusting. Contrary to what one might think, it’s not the humidity that makes our phalanges slither on the scales, but a viscous secretion produced by the animal itself. This substance has a protective function and many virtues. The mucus acts as a wall against parasites, bacteria and certain heavy metals. It limits external aggressions. Depending on the species, it enables the fish to swim faster, like a per-formance catalyst. Lastly, it ensures the fish’s relative survival outside its natural environment. Its slimy texture lubricates the fleshy walls, like any living organism whose membranes, which cover the cavities that are open towards outside, are called mucous membranes precisely. They are precious interfaces that connect the interior to the exterior, and this is what gives them an extreme sensibility.

This is Johan Creten’s fourth solo exhibition at Perrotin Paris. Everything shines here. Depending on the finish of the pieces, this shininess is more or less offensive, from the clarity of a patina to the stark brightness of an enamel. In the main room, several ensembles collectively form a panorama that calls to mind a marine world. Algae and shells remain identifiable motifs, swelling the iconography in the room through their graphic nature and their manner.

Several emerging Venuses are spiked with still humid petals. Their finery seems to consist of a density of tonic lips fixed in the impermeability of the glaze. One can smell the tide. The feminine contours take shape in series such as Odore Di Femmina and La Perle Noire, and of course The Herring, which surveys this drenched landscape in a god-like manner.The fascinating mood exuded by various glands thus wraps the body in a film that equips it with a transparent armor. Today the properties of this gelatin have drawn the interest of the scientific community, who see in the exceptional mucus a promising material that might revolutionize industry, especially the textile industry. Still underwater, the excretions of some specimens are composed of fibers whose quality may resemble the most delicate of silks. Thus, in its adult state, the hagfish, a kind of sea serpent that has haunted the abyss with its digestive tract since the dawn of time, is said to produce up to a million kilometers of this thread that is a hundred times thinner than a single hair. What a verti-go-inducing resource. This potential passementerie remains a defen-sive system of fatal efficiency for this type of eel. Once expelled, their mucus can occupy up to several hundred times its initial volume, instantly suffocating any predator, whose gills it causes to explode.

Johan Creten constantly stimulates the temptation to touch. A primor-dial taboo in many religions, including the religion of art, contact feeds the swelling of desire, making the other senses seem like preliminaries with regard to the fulfilment it demands. The ultimate taboo often claims to preserve the status of untouchable works in contrast to the vulgarity of objects that can be grasped and handled. To caress a bronze, to touch a ceramic are acts of transgression. There is the dual risk of hurt-ing oneself and of damaging the artefact. Here the artist even goes so far as to make us sit on the works. With his new series of Boulders, seven possible seats each possess a deadly sin. The installation devel-ops a certain symmetry with its Italian counterpart on display at the Villa Medici in Rome, to which an important monograph is devoted, ostensi-bly entitled I Peccati. Set up in the expectation of a catch, the situation recalls the stimulating articulation between pécheur (sinner) and pêcheur (fisherman).

Halieutics, the science of fishing, aims for a sensible management of aquatic ecosystems. It intervenes in the agronomy of the liquid bio-sphere. It also intervenes in research and informs scientists in their experiments in zootechnics. But for the moment, the creature with the miraculous mucus has resisted domestication and has failed to repro-duce in captivity. It thus refuses to see its invaginations exploited for the benefit of fashion corporations. And it is satisfied with its existence as a monster of the deep – a scavenger at that. Because it is indeed necro-phagous and has a habit of making its way into the remains to devour them from within. It cultivates in its own way a passion for the carcass, a tradition of the grotesque, that imperative hollow of cast iron or terra-cotta. Wrapped in its cloak of mucus, it remains ungraspable. Having said this, as any fish farmer will tell you, it is best to hold a fish with wet hands. It will be a little less slippery. It is therefore covered in drops of water that the surfaces touch. One generally takes part in such an inti-mate act in order to eviscerate. The swollen belly is then sliced cleanly, spilling its shimmering viscera.

Johan Creten opens up his shapes and their connotations enough not to freeze them in a single reading. The interpretations must remain mal-leable, from humor to disgust. He himself feeds off this ongoing quest for an image to gorge on. The series entitled Glory testifies in particular to this act of evasion. Its golden luster prevents the gaze from anchor-ing itself, its luminous intensity making us skid on the reliefs. A certain dynamism operates through motion and light, affirming the kinetic com-ponent of these modules. Theirs is a penetrating perspective. It draws us into a hypnotic vortex which inhales, which exhales. The rays expand towards the baroque splendors erected to exalt the sacred, all the while contracting to pierce the most secret depths of human morphology. In the distance lies this original black hole, a gap. Let’s call it Vulva. And since everything has always passed through a slit, that is precisely where the artist wants us to begin.”

Joël Riff

Photo : ODORE DI FEMMINA – SOLFATARA, 2019. Glazed stoneware. Sculpture : 39 3/8 × 20 1/2 × 18 1/8 inch | Sculpture : 100 × 52 × 46 cm. Courtesy of the artist & Perrotin

P L A N N E D   A C C I D E N T S

The letting go represents an important element in art: it is the moment where the artist forgets his or her intention, his or her will, to follow what presents itself in the process of creation and to be carried along like a “tool”. Pipaluk Lake falls within this register: she seeks to discover, to go beyond the limits of the known, of the “technically possible”. Thus, the title of her fourth exhibition at the Galerie Maria Lund – Planned accidents (Hasards planifiés) is also the description of her approach. The reason for the juxtaposition of these contradictory notions of planning and of accident resides in the fact that the work reaches for the expression and the materialization of contraries. Glass has the identity of a precious matter – a bit glitzy – but Pipaluk Lake uses banal plate glass, sometimes even recycled window glass as well as simple metal threads and metallic plates to create her sculptures. It is an aesthetic that questions the idea of beauty and ugliness; that places on the same level the sophisticated and the rough, the noble and the poor matters. Fragility and density cohabit there, as well as a luminous sheerness and matte opacity; a same work of art can recall elements and bodies as different as the wind or the rock. A medium for a sensorial and emotional experience, Pipaluk Lake’s work also prompts an intellectual questioning: the vision of her works raises the question of their creation, which process is narrated by the matter itself. One reads in it the more or less visible meeting of the glass, made fluid by the heat, with the metal that structures, orients and supports. Pipaluk Lake’s sculptures, rich in evocations, are poetries of the advent, of movement as well as a distinct permanence (of beauty).

H O W

The artist takes a long time to conceive her glass and metal “bundles”; she cuts, hammers, attaches, knits, sews… Putting into practice a know-how acquired during a quadruple training in fields as diverse as textile, glass, metal and wood. Once her complex preparation work finished, she abandons her “bundle” to the alchemy of heat and gravity inside the kiln. By opening it during the firing she can see at which stage the process is and decide to continue our to stop it. The result of the fusion offers a more or less big surprise, a result with which the artist works further on.

B A C K G R O U N D

The very atypical work of Pipaluk Lake (born in 1962) has been largely recognized and rewarded (Hempel Glaspris 1999 – Honorable Mention at the 2nd Chongju Int. Crafts Competition 2001, Korea – Silver Medal for the Kunsthåndværkerprisen af 1879) and it is featured in numerous public collections : V&A, London, Corning Museum of Glass, State of New York- Glasmuseum Alter Hof Herding, Germany – Boston Museum of Fine Arts – Kunstindustrimuseet (Museum of Decorative Arts), Copenhagen – The Danish Arts Foundation and the New Carlsberg Foundation. Pipaluk Lake has exhibited throughout Europe as well as in China, Korea, Canada, the United States and recently in Australia. In 2006, The Chappell Gallery in New York featured her in a solo show (Drops), in 2011 the museum Glasmuseet (Denmark) hosted an exhibition of her recent works (awarded by The Danish Arts Foundation) and in 2012 the public institution Sophienholm (Denmark) presented a retrospective exhibition of the artist – Pipaluk Lake 1987-2012. Hasards planifiés – Planned accidents is Pipaluk Lake’s fourth exhibition at the GALERIE MARIA LUND since 2008.

E D I T I O N

Publishing of a retrospective catalog, with a text by philosopher Yves Michaud (Exploration, Fragility, Beauty – until the limits of the material). This edition was supported by The Danish Arts Foundation.

The exhibition “Chaotically Yours” brings together these two worlds that explore the “letting go”.

Esben Klemann and Pernille Pontoppidan are two young Danish sculptors fascinated by the possibilities of matters already overused, banal, and omnipresent in our everyday environment. They have learned to perfectly master concrete, ceramics or stucco in order to better mistreat or surpass them. The accidental has become their trademark, by creating conditions in which matters react in an unexpected manner, merge, overflow, foam, contract or collapse.

ESBEN KLEMANN   sculpture – installation – animated film

Esben Klemann is an insatiable artist. He experiments, constantly. He tries, he models, destroys, reconstructs – then throws himself into the realization of a gigantic project where the exploration in depth of a form, multiplied again and again until the establishing of a system.

What drives Esben Klemann to this creative hyperactivity, is a will that he waves as a manifesto, as an artistic program in itself: escape boredom, flee banality. Thus, the neoclassical stucco friezes that adorn the bourgeois apartments go crazy, break, multiply, overlap. The urban furniture – benches, parapets, pavement slabs – erect, loop, undulate. And the gridded ceramic structures, that the artist meticulously constructs, are transformed in the kiln under the weight of heat, of gravity, or of an absurd object placed there.

The well-behaved matters that adorn everyday life, passing by the “Klemann filter”, seem to want to become alive, start a revolution, before going back to their inertia, congealed once again for eternity, immobile witnesses of the beginning of something. As if, for one moment in time, the frenzies of cartoons could have acted in our world.

The practice of drawing, revealed in the video that the gallery will present during the exhibit, is edifying. In hardly ten minutes, we see the artist sketch out on a computer hundred of shapes at a wild pace. The viewer is plunged into the heart of the creative process and observes on the screen the drawing of a sketch of an architecture, an object… It is the illustration of a sequencing logic, as we saw it with Fischli and Weiss – of an unbridled creativity.

Esben Klemann speaks of a “systematic incertitude”. The artist puts in place a process that never corresponds to the traditional treatment of the material he has chosen: he strives to perfectly master it until sublimating and exceeding its possibilities. He then watches the mistreated matter respond to his system each time differently, and makes of the accidental an artistic language.

Background
Esben Klemann (born in 1972) has studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Denmark, before having a number of exhibitions throughout the country, in institutions, (Charlottenborg, Bornholms Kunstmuseum, Vejen Kunstmuseum, Danmarks Keramikmuseum Copenhagen Ceramics, etc.), galleries and in the public space. In 2013 he was invited by the town of Vejen, to install 14 sculptures in concrete in the public space (projet EGNSBETON). The GALERIE MARIA LUND exhibited him for the first time during Summer 2013 in the context of Terres – Copenhagen Ceramics Invites.

PERNILLE PONTOPPIDAN PEDERSEN   sculpture

Pernille Pontoppidan Pedersen has lived isolated from the world for three years, on the small island of Bornholm, off the Danish coast, where the ceramics center of the Royal Danish Academy is. There she learned the discipline and the rigor that the work of the clay demands, the perfect mastery of elements that constitute subtle and refined objects characteristic of Danish design.

Then she made a full turn away from her original training. Alone in her studio with clay, glazes (and her dog), she experimented. She let the works she placed in her kiln burn, collapse, mix. She developed an aesthetic of the ugly, the failure, the missed attempt. The series of works she presented for her diploma was called abundance odieuse: that still life in volume was composed of absurd collages of accidents, aborted projects, radically different aesthetics… A mind-blowing accumulation of broken promises. The works of Pernille Pontoppidan tell a hundred pieces of fascinated stories superimposed in a cadaver exquis of good and very bad taste, of baroque and minimalism, of extreme dexterity and bitter failures.

The ambition of the very young artist isn’t exactly modest: To revolution the world of ceramics!  Slowly, at her rhythm, but with great assurance. She starts by undermining its bases, by disregarding her training to excellence, by integrating to her works  the failed experiences of the best ceramics artists of the country, collected for the series Ingratitude glorifiée, by killing the jar, the pot, bowl and all the craft objects, to which ceramics limited itself for a long time. And she already starts to reconstruct: shaky and almighty structures, tiered tempetto-pieces, sandcastles, heaps of found objects caught in a heavy flow of clay, foamy glazes that overflow like washing up fluid. As a skillful magician, she knows how to use the trick of the variation of the repetition, as a way to maker the object of her research more clearly visible.

Pernille Potoppidan Pedersen is twenty-six, and has already surpassed – maybe without even noticing – the never-ending debates regarding the definition of ceramics, its classification, its destination. Her work is rich, strong and powerful. If you think you have identified her system, her style, be assured, she is already elsewhere….

Background

Having received her diploma in 2012 from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Denmark in the Ceramics department in Bornholm (Denmark), Pernille Pontoppidan (born in 1987 in Denmark, where she lives and works) has exhibited her work since 2012. Her collaboration with Copenhagen Ceramics has allowed her to show her work in Paris, at the GALERIE MARIA LUND, in the collective exhibition Terres-Copenhagen Ceramics Invites (2013) in collaboration with the Palais de Tokyo, and to the exhibition space of the collective, in Frederiksberg in Denmark.