Camille Virot

Recent works

September 12 - November 5, 2009

Camille Virot - bol genèse. Bol-genèse, 2008, Mixed media.l . 40 cm.

" Known for having introduced and developed raku firing in France, Camille Virot has turned it into a personal aesthetic of life and work based on instinctive ceramic expression in phase with natural processes... With raku, Camille Virot has changed the ceramist's relationship with the studio. With much of the work taking place outdoors, the studio is no longer a fixed place where one concentrates on a precise production, but a place of creative mobility, implying a displacement of being, of the body in movement. This way of looking at artistic practice, in harmony with nature and no longer in rivalry, is opposed to the traditional Western conception. For Camille Virot, ceramic phenomena are a means of expressing the world, and imply a strength of language that is reflected in a unique and highly contemporary body of work, with its lack of fluidity, its ruptures, its contrasts and its energy...
He has always resisted technological excesses and the hierarchies between pot and sculpture, on the grounds that you can "bury your soul" in them in the same way.
Remaining true to the humanist ideals of the anti-establishment generation to which he belongs, he has also reconsidered African pottery, hitherto considered negligible, recognizing in the way African potters make pottery an instinctive, physical and sacred dimension lost in the West."
Carole Andréani, "Céramique contemporaine", 2007.

"...An artist's whole life can therefore be spent with a single obsessive idea, and the forms will gradually emerge from one another, following on from one another. At this point, we're living only in the world of the felt, and not at all in the world of ideas. This is the usual fate of the ceramist.... In this way, forms arise from the vagaries of a practice and enter into correspondence, like the words of a poem.In the ceramic imagination, the soil and subsoil are very present, the world of moles, the world where our feet rest and the foundations of cathedrals: this buried and mineral world is our obsession. The hidden exists, the invisible radiates. The other stimulus comes from the tradition we venerate: ceramic objects are also about action, about using the world, about responding to life's needs...So we're constantly stimulated by these two things, stone and flesh."
Camille Virot, Excerpt from "8 artistes & la terre", Éditions Argile, 2009.