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Johan Creten, Pliny's Sorrow,
2011
Resin, bronze simulation
450 x 450 x 190
cm
Courtesy of Almine Rech Gallery
JOHAN
CRETEN
PLINY'S
SORROW
20.05 -
23.07.2011
The
Almine Rech Gallery in Brussels is pleased to
present a solo exhibition of monumental bronze sculptures by
the Belgian artist Johan Creten.
PLINY’S SORROW is comprised of nine enigmatic
bronzes, eight of which were specifically created for the
exhibition. Creten, best known for virtuosic works in
kiln-fired ceramics, particularly his flowering Odore di
Femmina busts in terracotta, is also a master of lost-wax
foundry casting in bronze, and this ambitious exhibition
provides evidence of this on an unprecedented scale. Only one
work, Plantstok (1989-2009), an anthropomorphic and primitive
looking talisman in gilded bronze, is modestly sized. A
replica of the artist’s grandfather’s planting stick, it is
dwarfed by the other works - massive birds, exquisite
Kunstkammer monsters, towering columns, a giant bench set
between two flowering torsos - yet it too merits
the term monumental.
The
exhibition’s title is borr owed from the largest work in the
exhibition - an eagle-like bird, its giant wings
stretched out and broken, its roughly hewn back hollowed out.
The totemic monolith, at once heroic and melancholic,
obliquely illustrates a passage from Pliny the
Younger:
If
having the pictures of the departed placed in our homes
lightens sorrow, how much more those public representations of
them which are not only memorials of their air and
countenance, but of their glory and honour
besides!
Creten’s sculptures are neither monuments nor
anti-monuments: the memorializing, restorative and triumphal
power of public art, its ability to make us forget sorrow,
remember loss and celebrate all that is glorious and grand, is
at once destabilized and enriched. With each circling,
readings abound, meanings proliferate. The eagle, a familiar
figure in Creten’s oeuvre, resonates with symbolic and
political charge, and with pathos. Solid and imposing from the
front, rising majestically on a classically turned base to a
height of four and half meters and equally wide, yet seen from
another angle, it is mere bulk, a fragile shell, abstracted
and worn out.
The
solid and the ephemeral, forged in massive, enduring
bronze - this is Creten’s most remarkable
achievement.
The
interplay takes several forms. In La Mamma Morta, a huge
twisted column almost linking the gallery’s floor to its
vaulted ceiling is topped with a female torso. The reference
to the Chénier opera points us in one direction, the death of
patria or Motherland in another. Other columns bear exquisite
sea monsters: a human-like medusa skin on one; a writhing,
flamboyantly styled squid on another, its tentacles twisted in
on each other. Another pedestal, La Borne, rises and twists
through a potted history of Gothic and Baroque column design,
before being supplanted by a blackened 19th century industrial
smoke stack worthy of William’s B lake’s darkest and most
satanic mills. In French, a borne is a boundary marker, while
La Borne is a village in France known for its
ceramics.
Through Creten’s hybridized forms, the meanings, both
private and public, collide and shimmer, marking borders not
just in space but also in time, between landscape and history.
This comes close to describing the overall effect that Pliny’s
Sorrow elicits from us as we navigate our way through it: you
turn a corner and suddenly, what was hermetic and mysterious,
opens onto a uncontrollable effusion of meaning, as references
and registers drawn from natural history and art history pull
us towards a shockingly new and profoundly human
representation of the sublime.
Born
in Sint-Truiden, Belgium in 1963, Johan
Creten lives and works in Paris. In 2009 he was
nominated for the Flemish Culture Prize. A Prix de Rome
recipient in 1996, he has taught in the United States,
Holland, Belgium and France, and his works are in publ ic and
private collections around the world. He exhibited at the
Louvre in 2005 and the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in
2008. His work will be included in the exhibition Big Brother,
l'artiste face aux tyrans in Dinard, France, next summer. This
is his first exhibition at Almine Rech.
ALMINE RECH GALLERY
20
Rue de l’Abbaye
B -
1050 Brussels
T:
+32 32 26 485 684
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