June 2024
Guillaume Benoit
Daniel Pontoreau
Galerie Berthet-Aittouarès
May 24th → June 29th 2024
Following his personnal exhibition in 2023 at the Keramis ceramics museum in Belgium, the Galerie Berthet-Aittouarès presents Daniel Pontoreau with 20 sculptures: wall artpieces and artworks in space, created between 2002 and 2023.
Pontoreau’s artworks are characterized by striking contrasts between the violence of the material and the mastery of the gesture, between primal emotion and intellectual reflection. His forms, on the other hand, are deliberately simple, sometimes enhanced by delicate engravings or subtle drawings, surfacing as a scarification on the skin of his sculptures. This apparent simplicity reflects a search for authenticity and purity, far from any need for spectacular effect. Daniel Pontoreau is also a builder of space, and each exhibition becomes an installation in itself. "I don't want to dictate the reading, he says, I invite you to contemplate a waking dream space". This is how he proposes new ways of apprehending space and interacting with art.
Daniel Pontoreau exhibition at the Galerie Berthet-Aittouarès
Courtesy Galerie Berthet-Aittouarès, Paris
Carte blanche to Marie-Hélène Lafon:
Marie-Hélène Lafon presents Daniel Pontoreau: when a novelist dialogues with a sculptor. “Daniel Pontoreau seizes the subject of clay the way I seize the substance of language. With his whole body. It would be a matter of giving a shape to the chaos of the world. Without emphasis. It would be telluric and very bare.”
Marie-Helène Lafon writes about destinies, shaped by our earthly roots and a link to a homeland that we leave to invent our lives elsewhere. The earth, a subject for reflection and creation, brings together the writer and the sculptor-ceramist. The writer and the sculptor dialogue also because they share a common sensitivity. Marie-Hélène Lafon's work on language allows no concession, and gives substance to her writing in relief. Pontoreau moulds clay on the ground, the clay on Earth. He kneads it, engraves it, scarifies it, in order to mark a passage. Finally, they share an unsophisticated, unemphatic style, that directly appeals to the senses. They chose similar artistic expressions to question the silence of a "before landscape".
Daniel Pontoreau, Pierre scarifiée, 2002, terracotta with porcelain engobe, 25 x 30 x 27 cm
©Daniel Pontoreau, courtesy Galerie Berthet-Aittouarès
Marie-Hélène Lafon was awarded with numerous literary prizes for her novels, and recently published a book on Cézanne, Des toits rouges sur la mer bleue, Editions Flammarion.