Johan Creten - Bestiarium

Exhibition Catalogue Johan Creten : Bestiarium, presented at Museum La Piscine de Roubaix (12 march - 29 may 2022).

A major protagonist in the revival of ceramics, Johan Creten is an artist known around the world for his works which, whether glazed terracotta or musings in bronze, depict an unsettling strangeness and play with impaired vision, manhandle our representations and popular beliefs.

For the exhibition in Roubaix, designed in partnership with the Almine Rech gallery, the artist will present, in addition to two emblematic works from his career – C’est dans ma nature (2001) and De Vleermuis (2015-2019), a metamorphic bas-relief and a monumental fountain in the form of a bat, – an unusual set of seventeen ceramic animals (Beasts). A wild boar stuck in a bloody mire, a fly asleep like a cadaver tomb or a pelican petrified by unfathomable sadness: the bestiary is never naturalistic but symbolic, with each animal a sign of the ethereal, between desolation and abandonment, impulse and melancholy. No still lifes here: everything is alive, everything pulses and everything trembles. These faux-naïf beasts recount the political substance of a world made of conflict, struggle and resignation, but also of joy, consolation and hope. For if man is a political animal, the world is a splendid theatre of cruelty…