Terres incarnées: Anne-Laure Cano, Safia Hijos, Mathilde Sauce is in view at Galerie Terra Viva, Saint-Quentin-la-Poterie
June 2 – July 24, 2024
Contemporary ceramics is a sensory experience, powerful in the variety and perpetual renewal of forms and textures sought by artists, as evidenced by the work of the three guests in the “Terres incarnées” exhibition.
Far from the classical canons of beauty, Anne-Laure Cano, a French artist still little known in her own country (first exhibition!), has been exploring unstructured forms in which the notion of balance / imbalance is omnipresent since leaving school. Her sculpture is a game of construction/deconstruction/reconstruction, fueled by notions of identity and memory, a playful yet wild mirror of her own experiences, particularly as an expatriate.
Through her ceramics, Safia Hijos transcribes and transforms objects from our culture, tangible elements from our environment (currently natural elements), giving them a supernatural status and questioning our relationship with them in the process. A form of economy of means, combined with refined perfectionism and a great concern for materials and balance, give her creations a simplicity that reinforces their power of attraction. Water is the source of her current inspiration, its bluish hues as well as its capacity for transformation, whether liquid or solid, in the form of stalactites that invite themselves into our interior spaces.
Organic creatures in perpetual metamorphosis, Mathilde Sauce’s sculptures, at once abstract and carnal, are plant, animal, human, mineral and aquatic. Are they soft, smooth, rough, frosty, cold, hot…? The range of textures seems infinite and inexhaustible.
In this marvelous garden, fantastic and whimsical, funny and delicious, our sensations are put to the test. A childlike dazzle, mingled with a touch of anxiety in the face of strangeness, like a plunge into the mysteries of the living.
Anne-Laure Cano
Born in France, Anne-Laure Cano has built her professional career far from home. In 2008, she headed for London, where she trained in ceramics at City Lit College (graduating in 2017), before moving to Barcelona in 2021. Her arrival in Spain coincided with a dazzling start to her career: in the same year, she won two awards, including first prize at CERCO in Zaragoza, took part in group and solo exhibitions in museums, and saw her sculptures enter Hispanic public collections. At the same time, her European visibility increased: after the Foire d’Andenne in 2022, she took part in Collect 2023 and 2024 in London, and won the Young Masters Maylis Grand Ceramics Prize in 2023. These biographical details resonate with the powerful work of this artist, still little known to the French public. Her sculpture is narrative and abstract, nourished by her experiences as an expatriate.
The Ussade series perfectly reflects her creative and technical approach. The pieces are presented as a vertical assembly of elements conceived in different earthenware, stoneware or porcelain of diverse origins, in reference to her peregrinations, an accumulation of lived experiences. These formal translations of fragments of life, a diary of positive or negative emotions linked to this chosen exile, are served by meticulous glazing, complex textures and a pronounced taste for color. This remarkable work of composition, with its lines of tension, fractures and interplay of balance and imbalance, explores the theme of identity, revealing both human strength and weakness.
Safia Hijos
Safia Hijos’s ceramic work is perpetual motion. Her refined creations explore the history of ceramics and play with the material’s capabilities. Following her Supernature series exhibited at Terra Viva in the summer of 2021, the artist continues her exploration of space, the link between nature and architecture, and the relationship between the natural and the artificial, all the while maintaining precious attention to color and glaze.
The plant vines that used to invade the interior space, in rich shades of green, have given way to tubular, sober, elongated forms that could easily evoke the profusion of pipes in an organ set. Lines of varying lengths generate rhythm and volume. Their straightness contrasts with their apex, where the tube softens to create a mellow accumulation, a sensation of weight that opposes the fluidity of the form. Like her earlier foliage, these now-blue lines cascade from the ceiling or climb up the wall from the floor, inviting themselves into unexpected nooks and crannies, poeticizing our perception of space. In the Lignes d’eau series, they punctuate the wall space from place to place, sketching out a light-hearted musical score.
The simplicity of the form offers the possibility of playing with heaps and highlights the work of color, which is essential for Safia Hijos. Here, glazes vie with each other in shades of blue, while a few touches of brilliance enhance the satiny character of the whole, and pencil effects suggest luminous reflections. Her technique enables her to create subtle variations around blue, this time evoking water: water that shimmers, water that flows, water that congeals and mineralizes into thread-like concretions like stalactites, which have given this series its title: Stalaktos.
Mathilde Sauce
Dive into a whimsical and mysterious universe! Mathilde Sauce plays with our sensations and perceptions through her sculptures, which are both abstract and evocative of life in all its forms and metamorphoses.
Plants, first and foremost… Phantasmagorical plants, whose colossal size seems ready to engulf us! Curious plants, stretching their heads towards us and exploring space, attractive and repulsive at the same time, eminently exotic and sensual. This mobile character, this palpable movement, is also part of the animal and the human. Hybrid, purely imaginary figures, Mathilde Sauce’s sculptures invite us to immerse ourselves in the fascinating, strange beauty of the living.
The richness and diversity of our ceramic materials appeal to all our senses. Soft, smooth, rough, smooth, frosted, powdered, satin effects; aquatic, mineral, vegetable effects… Everything intrigues, calls to the hand, awakens our senses and recaptures our childhood wonder. Of course, sight, touch, and taste, as her sculptures are also an ode to gourmet delights. Like gigantic candies in tangy colors, they form an enchanted garden tinged with humor—a guaranteed sensory experience!
Contact
galerie@terraviva.fr
Galerie Terra Viva
14 rue de la Fontaine
30700 Saint-Quentin-la-Poterie
France
