POINT QUARTZ : Flower of Kent

Between base lines and gravity, a landscape on the ground builds itself around ceramics works realized by 20 artistis.

POINT QUARTZ (QUARTZ INVERSION) Flower of Kent testifies to the interest that contemporary artists have been manifesting for ceramics, seen as a media to be explored without being dependent on specific skills, without becoming precious, sometimes irreverently, and certainly without the use of stands.

The exhibition is an in situ installation occupying the 300 square meters of the Villa Arson’s Galerie Carrée, conceived as a garden with flowerbeds that have turned into a landscape. A landscape made of various strata, with the raw material of ceramics in all shapes and forms, from arable soil to terra cotta. Though the fundamental aspects of sculpture are present here, from verticality to its opposite horizontality, the uniqueness of the project stems from the pull of the law of gravitation.

The horizontal works on the floor by Bertrand Lavier, Dave Ball, Gladys Clover and others, compose a landscape that one can walk through, punctuated by vertical elements that seem irrepressibly pulled towards the floor, like Jules-Aimé Dalou’s leaning peasant (1838–1902) made of Sèvres stoneware, the dripping enamel on Cameron Jamie’s figures, or the flowing water on Vanda’s fountain of hair by Natacha Lesueur.

Dave Ball; Lyman Frank Baum; Baptiste Carluy; Paul Chazal; Marvin Gaye Chetwynd; Nancy Crater; Johan Creten; Aimé-Jules Dalou; Bernard Dejonghe, Quentin Euverte, Guillaume Gouerou and Paul Lebras; Gladys Clover; Cameron Jamie; Bertrand Lavier; Eun Yeoung Lee; Natacha Lesueur; Pascal Pinaud; Yvonne Roeb; Sterling Ruby; Elsa Sahal

Curator: Frédéric Bauchet, artist and teacher of ceramics at the École nationale supérieure d’art of Villa Arson, Nice.

Quartz inversion is the precise temperature of 573° Celsius which corresponds to a tricky step towards the melting point that irreversibly transforms clay into ceramic.

POINT QUARTZ Flower of Kent is the first part of a cycle of exhibitions that will be held under various forms in various venues, highlighting the notions of absence of color and of movement, and also the aspects of sound connected with the medium.