In a time of pandemics and social questions, in particular migration and the environment, artists absorb new realities, shoulder responsibilities and culpabilities, draw conclusions, and contribute in their own way to the vast concert of alarms being sounded.
All the ceramics presented in the exhibition Beautés équivoques more or less directly interrogate the visitor’s conscience in the face of certain great ethical questions confronting our contemporary societies.
What is this world? What is this world that has renounced Eden? What is this world that lets its creatures die and toys with the living? What is this world where soon humanity will struggle to survive on a hostile earth?
Every artist presented emphasizes the degraded state of the relationship uniting humanity with nature and human being with human being. At first glance, their works fascinate: colors, glazes, sheer beauty of the medium, apparent innocence and even whimsy catch the eye. Once under this seductive spell, the visitor is subject to an entirely different discourse—ironic, raw, grating, denunciatory. Some artists broach the terrain of ecological art (combining environmental ethics and esthetics), others privilege strangeness, expressing it with teeming detail and decorative exuberance, while still others evoke nostalgia for a primitive age, experienced as a moment of fusion with nature.
