Johan Creten: Bestiarium (La Piscine Roubaix)
La Piscine Roubaix & Gallimard, 2022
€35,00
A major protagonist in the revival of ceramics, Belgian artist Johan Creten (born in 1963) is an artist known around the world for his works which, whether glazed terracotta or musings in bronze, depict an unsettling strangeness and play with impaired vision, manhandle our representations and popular beliefs. This catalogue, published in conjunction with the major exhibition Bestiarium, hosted by La Piscine museum in Roubaix, explores the animality in his art.
For the exhibition the artist will present, in addition to two emblematic works from his career – C’est dans ma nature (2001) and De Vleermuis (2015-2019), a metamorphic bas-relief and a monumental fountain in the form of a bat, – an unusual set of seventeen ceramic animals (Beasts). A wild boar stuck in a bloody mire, a fly asleep like a cadaver tomb or a pelican petrified by unfathomable sadness: the bestiary is never naturalistic but symbolic, with each animal a sign of the ethereal, between desolation and abandonment, impulse and melancholy. No still lifes here: everything is alive, everything pulses and everything trembles. These faux-naïf beasts recount the political substance of a world made of conflict, struggle and resignation, but also of joy, consolation and hope. For if man is a political animal, the world is a splendid theatre of cruelty…
ISBN: 9782072984938
