Chiguer art contemporain invites you to discover Laurent Craste’s exhibition La triste opacité de nos spectres in our Montreal space. In this new body of work, the ceramist renews his tactic of appropriating the historical archetypes of porcelain from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
While we can still recognize his signature vases in these new sculptures – the models of the Medici vase, the Cordelier and the spindle vase remain distinctly identifiable – both the approach and the discourse are renewed here. There are no violent interventions nor subversive alterations of the decorations, as seen in his previous bodies of work, but rather suggestive assemblages and associations, evocative poses, and also a new predominant, omnipresent colour antinomic to porcelain, the ceramist’s favourite material: black. It is this black, so shiny and translucent, revealing the structural protrusions and embossed patterns, that bestows upon the works their spectral glow.
The formal darkness of the pieces is accompanied by a certain gravity of purpose, with works evoking the violence and identity tensions that permeate our societies, or pure melancholy. Yet, there is nothing sinister about these sculptures, from which the elegance of classicism always exudes. It is also necessary to highlight the numerous references to poetry, firstly to that of Mallarmé, from whom the exhibition title is drawn, but also to Baudelaire and Saint-John-Perse. In the Portraits de l’artiste en chauve-souris, the Vase au mal de fleurs and the troubling Pour pleurer une enfance, one can perceive the shadow of poets.
Born in France, Laurent Craste has lived and worked in Montreal for over 25 years. His research is centered on the conceptual exploration of the multiple layers of meaning of decorative objects, in their sociological, historical, ideological and aesthetic dimensions. This approach is embodied through a reappropriation of the historical archetypes of ceramics, which he uses as a medium to question the status of the collectible object which he sees as a social revealer, a ‘sign bearer’.
His work can be found in the following collections:
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
The Musée La Piscine
Musée d’art et d’industrie André-Diligent (France)
Everson Museum of Art (U.S)
The Musée des maîtres et artisans du Québec
The Art Gallery of Burlington
The Musée Bertrand
Claridge
World Affairs Canada
The Tom Thomson Art Gallery
The City of Montreal collection
Tourisme Montréal
Cirque du Soleil
Loto-Québec
Collection Majudia
And many private collections in Canada, the United States and Europe.
