Suspending the ephemeral is on view at Galerie Terra Viva, Saint-Quentin-la-Poterie
August 30 – November 15, 2026
Sumptuous glazes clinging to the walls of vessels, forms that come from afar – across space and time – floral motifs in bloom, colours delicately echoing one another: drawing on artistic references and the richness of their glazes, our three autumn artists, Audrey Ballacchino, Stéphanie Bertholon and Xavier Duroselle, bring together in their works the passage of time and the sublime radiance of the ephemeral.
Xavier Duroselle and Stéphanie Bertholon, partners in life, share a fascination with glazes. Each pursues their own research: for Xavier, the countless nuances of celadon, the intensity of copper reds, elegant crackled blacks, and the surprising Malabar pink; for Stéphanie, creamy whites, soft blues, subtle greys, often enhanced with touches of gold.
Xavier’s recent wood-fired kiln project was simultaneously rooted in the long history of ceramics and conceived as the creation of a contemporary tool adapted to today’s climate challenges – a technical challenge as well as a path towards renewal.
For Xavier, the new kiln has been accompanied by new, entirely hand-building techniques, dispensing with the potter’s wheel and giving his pieces a raw elegance. These are complemented by the novel textures of his glazes, whose tones mingle during firing. The timeless quality of his work, rooted in East Asian traditions and their emblematic glazes, finds renewed strength here.
Stéphanie soon becomes drawn to experimenting with this new equipment herself, exploring the effects of wood firing on her glazes. The results are stimulating, bringing a delicate mattness and a gentle patina to her refined pieces.
The next step follows naturally: intertwining their two worlds, at once so close and so personal, sharing the modelling and decoration in order to bring forth a new language. Stéphanie’s usually highly defined glazing, which creates a natural yet structured decoration across her wheel-thrown forms, responds to the relief created by Xavier’s coil-building; it merges into a sumptuous two-tone surface with marbled reflections. The pieces produced through this four-handed collaboration are presented here to the public for the first time.
The sculptural work of Audrey Ballacchino, meanwhile, is rooted in Baroque traditions shaped by the cultural identity of the artist’s Sicilian origins. Her compositions play with the idea of trompe-l’oeil: vessels overturn, draperies coil and unfurl, movement becomes inscribed within the object, and the moment is suspended. Their theatrical dimension comes to the fore, continuing the fully staged installations she has created in the past.
The ornamental profusion of her sculptures, sustained by the refinement of her modelling, recedes beneath expanses of shimmering glazes that unify the decorative elements into a single volume. Vessels, flowers and draperies intertwine in the same sweeping movement.
The ceramicist’s virtuosity echoes that of the painters of still lifes and vanitas of the modern era, while embracing the symbolic dimension of objects. Between realism and spirituality, her sculptures question our relationship with time, transience and finitude.
The omnipresence of flowers – roses, chrysanthemums – a vivid memory of cemetery visits with her grandmother, evokes at once the fleeting and fragile nature of existence, but also, fully, its beauty.
Contact
galerie@terraviva.fr
Galerie Terra Viva
14 rue de la Fontaine
30700 Saint-Quentin-la-Poterie
France
