Océane Madelaine

For this new exhibition at the Galerie de l’Ancienne Poste, Océane Madelaine — a ceramicist and writer — was initially haunted by words, and by a title that forced itself upon her: “Dans le subtil” [In the Subtile / Subtle]. The artist explains this choice and the essence of her approach to the exhibition as follows:

" It was the desire to pay attention to the tenuous, the fragile, to what quivers on the surface of the material: traces, markings, lines, spots, minuscule vibrations that stir and move us. Subtle comes from sub, “under”, and tela, “woven fabric”. It is as if one were under the warp threads of the loom, under the words of the text, beneath the skin of the clay. Driven by this unwavering conviction that in a brutal world, things also take place in the subtle, in secrecy—that something is at work underneath, despite ourselves, pulsating and resisting, infinitely.
This quest for the subtle took shape, as it always does for me, in vessels: large bowls, boxes, but above all in jars, a new form I tamed this winter. Guided by Michel Leiris’s magic formula, “Argile: j’y lis la jarre” [Clay: in it I read the jar], (in Langage Tangage), I sought in turn to read this form with my hands. Deciphering its foot, its curve, its shoulder, its neck—uncovering an architecture that is both minimal and ample, ancestral and powerful. To shelter not provisions of wheat, oil, or honey, but, I hope, subtle reserves of meaning."

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