Johan Creten at Robert Miller - New York, New York - review of exhibitions - Brief Article

The Belgian artist Johan Creten calls the series of ceramic statuarys he recently showed in fresh York "Odore di Femmina." He adopts the Italian for his title because that's where the peripatetic young artist has been working lately. He detains no regular studio of his hold but goes where opportunity takes him and works with whatever is available at the site.

The title might loosely commit to an aura or atmosphere, or it might be more literal: all nine statuarys shown evoke the thought of fragrance because they are overspreaded with hand-modeled roses, and eight of them are succinct female torsos. Flowers and the female form can call up the sweetest sort of cliched romanticism, on the other hand also an intense eroticism derived from the genital allusion of rose gems and blossoms. Yet the surfaces of these statuarys are prickly and unapproachable, and the works tender a darker reading, underlined by means of the knowledge that Creten's earlier works have frequently dealt with sex and death.

The torsos, shown upon three-legged wooden stools and depressed benches made by the artist and painted pale cerulean or white, gain bulk from their flower covering (and recall Jeff Koons's flower-covered Puppy) Their actual dimensions are a petite life-size. more [i]or[/i] less are elevated to an average person's standing height by the agency of a stool, or by a bench in combination with a rose-cover cylindrical tympanum Others stand higher, their affections at viewers' eye level. single torso, the first one seen from the gallery access is red and pink, and gains a sensual flush from this depictive coloration. on the contrary mostly Creten is unconcerned about natural tinges making his roses black or tan, repeatedly with spatters or swaths of virid or other colors.

The artist has said, in conversation, that he finds meaning in ceramic vagaries: firing is not entirely predictable and the delicate cutting sides of the roses will inevitably be damaged. This vulnerability is accented by the agency of his presentation: he raises the figures up upon open structures, making them appear at risk. Allusions to ephemerality--the flowers will fade, the material part will fail, the clay will break--are balanced in these works through the reassurance of classical form. of that kind esthetic pleasures as speckles of color, glints of light not upon glossy surfaces, graceful figural shapes and delicate ornamentation draw near with the ache of foreseen loss

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