In his exhibition Les abstractions impertinentes, Laurent Craste presents an entirely new body of work, the result of ten months of formal and technical exploration. The ceramic artist moved away from the classical vase shapes that characterized his previous series. However, a continuity remains in his practice, particularly in the process of subversive aggression inflicted upon his creations, colored or glazed porcelain shapes that are abstract, singularly impaled, struck, suspended, tied with rope, or pierced with darts.
Indeed, this series fully aligns with the artist’s ongoing reappropriation of archetypal ceramic forms, a strategy that enables him to question the very status of the art object. Abstraction, as a formal language, is thus subverted both through direct interventions on the material and through the ironic use of motifs borrowed from decorative repertoires as well as from contemporary art.
However, this new body of work distances itself from the historical classical figures of ceramics and from the wheel-throwing techniques that characterized his earlier series. Instead, it engages in a formal and conceptual exploration of abstraction through experimentation with extrusion and hand-building techniques, colored clays, pigments, and decals. These approaches allow him to exploit the material’s remarkable plasticity, as well as to play with color and depth across the surfaces of organic or geometric forms.
Laurent Craste, originally from France, has lived and worked in Montréal since the early 1990s. His work is included in the collections of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, La Piscine – Musée d’art et d’industrie André-Diligent (France), the Musée Bertrand (France), the Everson Museum of Art (United States), the Musée des Métiers d’Art du Québec, the Art Gallery of Burlington, as well as numerous other institutional and private collections in Canada, the United States, and Europe.
