Bertrand Secret

"From the outset, my work has been rooted in the need to consider the hybrid, the multiple, to cherish human, animal, plant and fungal otherness. To use grafts, rhizomes and mycorrhizae to make room for spirits, ghosts of the past and phantoms of the future. To camp in the troubled and the indistinct. To metabolize strangeness, however disquieting.
My ceramic sculptures and paintings are the embodiment of these hybridizations of the living, the creatures that come to life in the belly of the kiln or come alive with pigment under my brush, are the guardians of a life that is more than itself, the guardians of the mesh of all beings that have crawled, run and flown on this planet and of the life forms that will succeed us. The creatures that haunt my studio have the power of archetypes, they are from here and there, from today, yesterday and tomorrow. They are strangely familiar, yet unfathomably otherworldly. They are shamans, magicians, wild children, divinities. They are not figures, they are. Embodied matter of space and time.
More than ever, my role as an artist is to participate in a symbiotic becoming. And if we have to land, as Latour says, and urgently need to be reminded if need be that we are Earthlings, each of my pieces echoes this filiation."


Born in 1982. Lives and works in Néant-sur-Yvel (Morbihan).

TRAINING

- 2020-22: Master in Ecopoetics and Design, Aix-Marseille University (Bouches-du-Rhône) - 2008: École Nationale des Fleuristes de Paris - 2005: DNAP, ENSBA Nantes (Loire-Atlantique).

EXHIBITIONS

- 2022: Museu del Càntir, Argentona (SP) - Carré Sculpture, Marché Céramique Contemporaine, Giroussens (Tarn) - Merci de déranger!, Musée de Picardie, Amiens (Somme) - Recto-
verso, Les Traces Habiles, Paris - 2019: Un collectionneur - un designer - un musée : comment montrer l'art, La Piscine / Musée d'art et d'industrie André Diligent, Roubaix (Nord) - 2018 : European Ceramic Context, Bornholm Art Museum (DK) - 2017 : FORM Miami (US) - SOFA Chicago (US) - Le pouvoir des fleurs, musée de la Vie romantique, Paris - 2016 : Résidence d'artiste au Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park, Ko- ka, Shiga (JP)
- 2015 : Parcours Céramique Carougeois, International Biennial of Contemporary Ceramics, Carouge (CH).