Chiguer art contemporain is delighted to present Les matérialistes, Élise Provencher’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. This new project offers an exploration into Élise’s sculptural universe. With theatricality and humor, the artist glorifies the mundane and everyday life, sharply capturing the spirit of the times and her personal concerns in the clay.
Crafted in ceramic and enhanced with colorful glazes, her creations, at once raw and soft, strange and enticing, reflect the duality and complexity of human nature. Provencher here unveils a variegated cast of characters caught in moments of everyday life. Depicted in action, the expressive and fluid figures engage in recreational pastimes or traditional trades. Fishermen, gardeners, miners, and shepherds are interconnected in sketches, composing a narrative fresco within the gallery.
The exhibition highlights the prodigious ability of humans to manipulate and transform natural material through their manual and physical skills, thus drawing a parallel between these ancestral savoir-faire and the art of sculpture. With romanticism and melancholy, Provencher emphasizes the nobility of these trades, often undervalued in a postmodern era obsessed with mechanization and technological progress. She also celebrates the intimate and complex relationship these artisans of the Earth maintain with nature, a bond corrupted by modernity. The characters, executed in a naïve style that transcends eras, appear as custodians of an age-old wisdom, the last representatives of a bygone world.
