VIVIAN VAN BLERK
(1971-2024)
Exposition Hommage

MEMENTO MORI, "Souviens-toi que tu mourras" est un des concepts qui traverse toute la carrière de Vivian Van Blerk, s'immisçant subtilement, mais puissamment, dans ses œuvres, qu'il s'agisse de la mort de l'individu, de celle de notre environnement ou de celle des civilisations, pour donner naissance à de nouvelles formes de vie.
C'est sur ce fond que nous cherchons à lui rendre hommage en réunissant autour de son travail ceux qui l'ont aimé lui et son œuvre.

Nous vous invitons au preview le 21 mai 2025 à 19h au 12 rue Martel Paris 10 dans la Galerie Dominique Fiat

et dans le cadre de la Paris Gallery Weekend 2025.

VIVIAN VAN BLERK

There is no there there.

Gertrude Stein

Photographs are of models built, decors arranged, collages composed or of just a fleeting moment. After the photograph is taken, its temporary model is dismantled, destroyed or recycled. The moment has passed.

The original gone, our only access to that vanished place is through the photograph.

The photograph tantalizes. It is a door to a world where the viewer's imagination is engaged. One might wonder what happened before and what will happen next. That which hides in the shadows or lies just outside the frame is the artist's gift to the viewer's fancy.

Vivian van Blerk, Paris 2016

I began making ceramics in Lebanon in 2017. Temporary constructions for photographs become finished pieces. Even as durable sculptures , the fictions created remain sealed beneath the brilliant screen of ceramic glaze and remain mysterious, silent and removed from us in time and in space and scale, unattainable like worlds seen through photographs.

Paris 2019

Archipel

Avec « Archipel » Vivian van Blerk imagine toute une nouvelle série d’îlots formés d'éléments d’architecture, véhicules abandonnés et autres ruines, derniers témoins de la présence de l’homme sur terre, envahis par les restes de nos déchets mais aussi nouvellement colonisés par toute une faune et une végétation aussi bien terrestres qu’aquatiques.

Ces nouveaux micro écosystèmes sont parfois reliés entre eux par des bancs de méduses assurant ainsi une nouvelle solidarité animale.

La notion de temps n’a plus aucune importance, la notion de bien ou de mal non plus.

Pascal Odille

Expert CNES - Paris, Avril 2022

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Langouste voyage, 45x38x27cm, earthenware - faïence

Haussmann's Island, 44x34x34cm, stoneware - grès

Odyssey - The Rescuer, 28x14x12cm, Porcelain

Vulture Restaurant, 52x48x48cm, stoneware - grès

Les Pêcheurs de pearles, 44x38x26cm, stoneware - grès

Lord of Land and Sea, 38x32x32cm, stoneware - grès, Urn with lid

Odyssey - The Kraken, 27x18x11cm, Porcelain

Ghosts of Futures Past

2022

Between being modeled and finally glaze fired, ceramics enjoy an ephemeral in-between life.

These panted clay sculptures gather in an installation. The moment is captured on photographic film.

Afterwards each piece is fired. The gouache and acrylic paint applied to the clay for the photograph burns away and they emerge from the kiln wearing a new and permanent ceramic glaze.

Whe pieces are dispersed, the photograph remains as a trace of the diasappeared past.

Ghosts of Futures Past, Colour photograph, 105x100cm.jpg

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2020 - Miscellaneous months

Clay is such a rich medium, a ceramic artisan can spend a lifetime to discover and use only a fraction of its endless formal possibilities. As an artist coming late to clay, I do not aspire to replicate the patiently acquired craft of a potter, yet neither can I let myself settle into one narrow groove when there are so many potential languages available.

The fifteen months following the giant installation of vanities in Beyond the Vessel have been dedicated to varying themes and forms and other technical approaches, to discover new roads down which I might travel further.

This is also the groundwork to ultimately combine ceramics with photography.

The Glade / La Clairière Stoneware and porcelain ceramic group	The Glade (detail) Stoneware and porcelain ceramic group	The Glade Stoneware and porcelain ceramic group. Detail
The Glade "Diorama" Photograph of Stoneware and porcelain ceramic group hand coloured BEFORE FINAL FIRING WHICH ERASED THE COLOUR.	Le Malade Imaginaire / The Hypochondriac Porcelain	La traversée du désert Stoneware. Porcelain elements.
Narcissus on the Styx II Porcelain. Mirror.	Narcissus on the Styx Porcelain. Mirror.	Narcissus on the Styx III Porcelain. Mirror.
Narcissus on the Styx IV Porcelain. Mirror	In a Dark Forest Lost Stoneware	Rings Porcelain
Finger Rings Stoneware and porcelain	The Reading Room Stoneware	Tower of Babel Stoneware
Tower of Babel Stonware	The Very Thought of You Stoneware	Adventure in the Garden Stoneware urn
The Meduses Porcelain wall-mounted applique	Jellyworld Earthenware wall-mounted consol. With porcelain rhino	The Meduses Porcelain wall-mounted applique
Jellyworld Earthenware wall-mounted consol.	Haussmann's Island Stoneware and porcelain

On the Beach

2019

A fleet of turtle arks carry life and memory across oceans to populate a long-abandoned city.

Curated by Catherine Milner of Messums Wiltshire with Károly Aliotti of Meşher, Istanbul.

ON THE BEACH participates in BEYOND THE VESSEL, an exhibition of ceramics by thirteen contemporary artists at the Meşher Gallery, 211 Istiklal Caddesi, Istanbul, until 22 December 2019. The show then travels to the United Kingdom.

Stoneware, porcelain, photography.

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Vanities II and III
Paris and Beirut

Through 2018 I explored the rich vein of formal and narrative possibilities suggested by the human skull as a ceramic vessel.

A high point of this project was the month residency at Bkerzay ceramic center in Lebanon where I was able to create the bulk of the collection exhibited at the annual

Beirut Design Fair.

Vanities I

2017

I caught the ceramics bug in Beirut. Returning to Paris I wanted to continue transforming simple vessels into narrative worlds. But now working alone, I no longer had raw bowls, bottles, cups or vases as bases to work on. impatient to get on and make works, I was not yet ready to learn the patient, precise craft of pottery first.

The solution was in the studio space I share with archaeologists who store all the skeletons excavated from the ancient burial grounds beneath the local church, Saint Lucien in La Courneuve. Having already photographed and drawn some of the more intact skulls, I found them not difficult to model acceptably in clay.

So my basic vessel was the skull. It brings with it a reminder of mortality and of the memories and feelings of life that cling to our remains. It has an outside and an inside on which stories can be told.

Vanities I culminated in an exhibition at the Wunderkammer in Brussels in December 2017.

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Beasts of Beirut

2017

My introduction to ceramics came in April 2017 when invited to collaborate with Katya Traboulsi, multimedia artist, and Hala Matta, ceramicist, at Namika Atelier in Beirut, Lebanon. I modeled relief sculpture on forms built by Hala which were then glazed by Katya.

We worked in various stoneware clays and once in Raku clay.

Photography acquires some of the dignity it lacks when it ceases to be a reproduction of the real and shows us things that have ceased to exist.

Marcel Proust

in Swann's Way

I and My Chimney

2011 -

The chimney hearth endures as generations come and go, playing out their passing passions .

"The Flood Foretold",

2016

No.8 of the series of nine photographs

Buffon

Buffon's Grandchildren

2011 -

Species have had time to adapt to man's presence. They find niches to inhabit and even unsuspected opportunities to evolve.

Georges-Louis Leclerc

de Buffon

An engraving from his Histoire Naturelle, 1753 - 1767.

Buffon's foregrounding of animals against real or fantasy environments is the mainspring for this series.

The Pests

Colour photograph from retouched b&w negative

125cm x 125cm, 2014

On the Beach

Colour photographs in triptych, 100 x 240cm

Seven Capital Vices

2008

A castaway arrives on a barren coast. Before the tide rises and chases everyone off the beach, he must choose. Either he joins the Vices in their earthly passions or he scales the ruins of the church to hitch a ride on a balloon. Where they go to to is uncertain, but it is away from this infernal shore.