Pálma Babos, balances

Reality can sometimes resemble science fiction. “The era we live in inspires me. Art is a kind of mirror”, Pálma Babos, born 1961 and a member of the International Academy of Ceramics, confides. Her porcelain buildings and their futuristic design portray a fragile, twilight world doomed to disappear. The Hungarian artist fixes a moment in time, a tipping point. Her ghostly skyscrapers, which make up a broad part of the show presented at La Galerie de l’Ancienne Poste, are never quite vertical. They are never quite down either, but fixed within the moment of their collapse. How could we not be reminded, when facing some pieces that work as a duo, of the New York Twin Towers attack on September 11^th, 2001?

Architecture becomes organic with Pálma Babos. The buildings lean, bend, bow, warp and writhe before destruction. The artist sculpts chaos, yet, paradoxically, an impression of serenity emanates from her works, as though the underlying violence was somewhat appeased by the sensuality of the material, the calmness of the surface and the immaculate whiteness that takes on grey hues through the play of shadow and light.

Through their phantasmagoric nature, these buildings evoke in some ways the ones in city paintings with blurred effects by painter Philippe Cognée, and the asymmetry of the arrangements recalls the destructured lines of architect Frank Gehry. Yet poetry is what Pálma Babos prefers referring to. “I could compare my creative process to the writing of a sonnet, controlled by strict rules and rigour”, she says. At a cross between sculpture and design – the artist also produces murals, some of which will be shown here in Toucy – each work results from the complex assembly of a multitude of clay tablets. Delicately, floor upon floor, the buildings rise and grow before the firing sets them, at the very limit of their tipping point.

Guillaume Morel

Journalist & Art critic