François Bauer: Le jardin extraordianire is on view at La peau de l’ours, Brussels
May 5 – June 22, 2024
La peau de l’ours is pleased to present Le jardin extraordianire, a solo exhibition by ceramist François Bauer.
For François Bauer, ceramics came late, out of a real need to make. The absolute need to make things with his hands. Immersed in the graphic arts since childhood, he decided to study this specialisation at Chaumont before studying object design at the HEAR in Strasbourg. But soon dissatisfied with being limited to conceptualisation and drawing, he decided to turn to working with clay and trained at the Institut Européen des Arts Céramiques in Guebwiller. The die had been cast, and as he says himself, his life will be forever dedicated to ceramics.
Today in his artistic practice, everything blends together. Without any confusion or repentance, whether in form or in what we might call decoration. It’s as if everything is expanding, being decided and designed in a kind of extension of the realm of the object. For him, everything still starts with the drawing, which he then formulates with the grace and strength of ceramics into astonishing constructions rising in space. The object is also summoned despite itself, from the cup or jug, which is displayed in our collective memory, before being cut up, deconstructed, assembled into curious plates, like veritable tectonics of matter. Drawings are always extracted from the blank sheet of paper to come to life and run across the volumes, where curious motifs play on the relief and shine of the surface, in this case calling on painting and landscape. The profusion of both signs and colours is a matter of course, initially freezing our gaze before teaching us to turn around each work to appreciate its contours and twists.
There’s no doubt about it, François Bauer likes to play, to have fun, to stage a mischievous nature that makes a mockery of scale and formal beauty, even if it means blurring our vision and making our eyes twitch a little. There’s a surrealist dimension to these compositions that he loves to draw on memories of a gentle, happy childhood spent in the heart of the Savoyard mountains. He speaks readily of his grandmother’s wildly contrasting English patchworks and the cheerfully kitsch tablecloths his mother loved to collect, as well as the sweetness of blueberry tart and all those curious objects that filled the house and fascinated him so much as a child. For him, there’s the happiness of his early years, like a treasure to be preserved, that lightness of life given to him by a loving and beloved family, which he wants more than anything to perpetuate and share. There is a world beyond the world, an extraordinary garden in which to lose oneself, fertile soil to cultivate and see blossom.
In this collision of blossoming memories and beautifully fulfilled practices, here he is building his work, and along the way offering us his first solo exhibition full of emotion and beautiful feelings. These days, there’s not enough of that to depict all the darkness of our humanity, so we’re delighted when a young artist suddenly holds up a distorting mirror to a world where love and play prevail over the misfortunes of the present moment. And let’s hope that, like mad singer named Charles Trenet – who gave us the title of this joyous, earthy opus, François Bauer, who strives to draw happiness, succeeds in imposing it on all of us tomorrow as the only art of living and the only reason to create!
Text by Jean-Marc Dimanche, Co-director of ceramic brussels & founder of De mains de Maîtres Biennal.
Contact
info@lapeaudelours.net
La peau de l’ours
55 rue Emile Claus
1050 Ixelles
Belgium
