[VO] - Virginie Levavasseur and Olivier Noël
Olivier Noël is a designer and ceramist who loves useful shapes. Virginie Levavasseur is a visual artist and writer, and likes the opposite. One graduated from ESAD Saint-Étienne, the other from ESAM Caen-Cherbourg, but 20 years apart. One lives in the east of France, the other in the opposite direction. Virginie and Olivier met in 2020, inspired by a desire to work with materials, to discover their limits and fragilities.
The work of the designer and the visual artist blends two worlds, forcing them to think about use in order to question it. The work presented here echoes the forbidden chairs that punctuate our daily lives. Chairs that are prevented, deformed and mishandled, until they lose their usefulness, until they are no longer the sign of a seat. Ceramics, which combine random transformation of materials and deformation by fire, are used against the grain. [VO] hijacks the vocabulary of useful forms, putting them in suspension, out of use, using local materials. The two artists seek out the physical limits of matter, which begins with harvesting and long, loving preparation by hand.
Chairs rise up, feverish, impracticable, either from experimentation with baked cob that has become friable, for example, or from the improbable, random potential of deliciously capricious harvested clays. [VO] works mainly with high-temperature stoneware, but also with combinations of materials and earth in all its forms. As a result, chairs in waiting rooms or on café terraces have resolutely and durably taken on the material, and will soon be nothing more than sculpture, architecture and installation. JMD
V de [ VO ] : born in 1978. Lives and works in Cherbourg-en-Cotentin (Manche).
O de [ VO ] : born 1976. Lives and works in Clermont-en-Argonne (Meuse).
TRAINING
/ V DE [VO] - 2020: DNSEP Art, ESAM Caen-Cherbourg - 2000 : CAPES Lettres Modernes.
/ O DE [VO] - 2003: Post Diplôme CyDRe, ESAD Saint-Étienne (Loire) - 2000: DNSEP Design, ESAD Saint-Étienne.
EXHIBITIONS [VO]
- 2022 : Les Inutilitaires, Galerie des Arts du Feu, Rouen (Seine-Maritime) - 2021: En Attente, Galerie La Bouée, Cherbourg-en-Cotentin (Manche) - Chrysalide et Sièges empêchés, Tollevast (Manche) - Playtime, Bricquebec-en-Cotentin (Manche) - 2020: Manière d'hybrider des mondes, Caen (Calvados) - 2019: Céramique année 0, La Cité du Design, Saint-Étienne.
