Océane Madelaine

For this new exhibition at Galerie de l’Ancienne Poste, ceramist and writer Océane Madelaine was first haunted by words, and by a title that soon imposed itself: Dans le subtil (Within the Subtle). The artist explains this choice and the essence of her approach:

“It was the desire to pay attention to the tenuous, the fragile, what quivers on the surface: traces, markings, lines, stains, faint vibrations in the material that move and stir us. Subtil comes from sub, “under”, and tela, “web or canvas”. One might be beneath the warp threads of a loom, beneath the words of a text, beneath the skin of clay. With the unshakable conviction that, in a brutal world, things also take place in the subtle, in secrecy – that something is working from below, despite ourselves, that pulses and resists, endlessly.
The search for the subtle took shape, as it always does for me, in containers: large bowls, boxes, but above all in jars, a new form I grew familiar with this winter. Guided by Michel Leiris’ magical phrase: “Argile: j’y lis la jarre” (“in clay I read the jar”, Langage Tangage), I in turn sought to read this form with my hands. To decipher its foot, curve, shoulder and neck, revealing an architecture at once minimal and ample, ancestral and powerful. No longer to shelter stores of wheat, oil or honey, but, I hope, subtle reserves of meaning”.

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