Arnaud Vérin
Using the ceramic medium, Arnaud Vérin explores what he calls "the pseudo-city", a place where architecture, ornaments and knick-knacks meet in digressions that are sometimes carnal, sometimes vegetable, sometimes mineral. This non-place," he says, "multiplies the strange carnival of ancient cities, still active thanks to the multiple metamorphoses that interweave over the generations.
His chimerical works are reminiscent of Arcimboldo's compositions, fanciful, even fantastic grafts between the plant and animal kingdoms, or sometimes, with their baroque, utopian architecture, Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. For him, the whole constitutes an Ideal City, an accumulation of objects that originally had nothing to do with each other, but which, through their misappropriation, celebrate the wedding of a new, somewhat surrealist, world.
To execute this unreasonable design, modeling, slabbing and carving are invoked. To embody the surface, he often explores engobe, enamel and paint, but also likes to leave the clay bare, more and more raw, as dull, shiny and satin are combined according to the quality of the seasons and his moods. The heterogeneous nature of the work recurrently questions ornamentation, but can perhaps also be read as a true self-portrait of the artist. JMD
Born in 1982. Lives and works in Saint-Ouen (Loir-et-Cher).
TRAINING
- 2010: Postgraduate Diploma in Ceramics and Polymerization, HEAD, Geneva (CH) - 2009: DNSEP, ENSAB Angers (Maine et Loire).
EXHIBITIONS
- 2019 : Biennale internationale de Vallauris (Alpes-Maritimes) - 2017: Idem, 19th Biennale internationale de céramique contemporaine, Châteauroux (Indre) - 2016: Céramique 14, Salon de céramique contemporaine, Paris - 2015: Objectif Terre, 18th Biennale internationale de céramique contemporaine, Châteauroux - 2010: Biennale internationale de Vallauris.
