With earth as a common thread and a reflection on ceramics as a creative material, Ben is exhibiting around a hundred works until September 19, at the Magnelli Museum, ceramics museum, in Vallauris.
The exhibition It’s not cooked at all, I’m not Picasso presents his work from his first creations dating from the end of the 1990s, beginning of the 2000s, up to around forty new pieces created for this exhibition, in which he integrates his famous aphorisms.
Dishes revisited from his famous writings, installations in which he seems to take pleasure in abusing the material, words shaped in ceramic associated with painted writings bringing the materials into dialogue, everything here shows the artist’s desire to explore all the creative processes. .
Original and uninhibited
Combining pieces in which he uses different techniques, the artist appropriates ceramics in its different identities. That of decorative use when he revisits trinkets and objects typical of 19th century productions, that of the very nature of the medium through its fragility when he uses fragments of broken ceramics and that of the ancestral gesture of the potter when he shapes his hands figurines or writings.
All with this particular generosity that he develops by inviting, at his side, his friend Monique Thibaudin who presents an installation of his blue anti-busts, the result of an exhibition produced by the visual artist at the villa Majorelle from Marrakesh. This original artistic proposal, uninhibited, full of life and humor is completed by the constant desire of the artist to address the public directly and to challenge it by intervening directly on the walls and on the exterior facade of the room. of exposure.
Thus, in a participatory approach, he invites the public to be photographed in a bathtub, reminiscent of the one filled with slip in which he had immersed himself with Monique Thibaudin in Vallauris, in 2006, during a memorable performance at the pottery museum. by Michel Ribero on the occasion of his exhibition entitled I suck at ceramics.
Everything here testifies to a certain recklessness in his encounter with the earth material but also to the incessant questioning and suspicions of provocation that inhabit the creator and form the substrate of his reflection and his artistic approach.
Ben, It’s not cooked at all, I’m not Picasso. Magnelli Museum, in Vallauris. Open every day, except Tuesday, from 10 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. and from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m. Prices: 6 euros, reduced 3 euros. Such. 04.93.64.71.83.
Explanations by Ben himself….
Why this exhibition in Vallauris?
I was offered a large exhibition on 3,000 square meters in Mexico, I declined the offer and preferred Vallauris because here we are in Occitania. And then, here, there were Picasso and Madoura. At Vallauris, I understood that you had to be creative. Ceramics is a kind of challenge for me.
What does the earth represent for you?
My basic material is writing and the earth comes long before writing, since the first men who took mud in their hands and let it dry. I like to touch the wet earth, to feel it slip through my fingers. It’s a sensual experience because I can give it different shapes and exercise my creativity. We can invent anything with the earth.
How do you reconcile your need for spontaneity and immediacy with the frozen aspect of expression when the earth has dried or is baked?
It annoys me to wait for this phase. I am impatient. Hence my desire to break dishes as a work of art, which obviously is part of the creative process. But it gets more complicated when it comes to a plate by… Picasso. (laughs)
The relationship between earth and writing?
I wonder a lot about this. I like to write because there is a spontaneity of the idea. One is not so far from the other because from their expressions springs the idea. My writings, this colorful fresco that I affixed to the back wall of the Eden room, that’s my message, that’s what I want to say, that’s the real Ben! And of course it nourishes all the other forms of expression that I use. All these techniques that show ceramics, through the gesture when we model shapes or these plates that we break, represent the different identities of ceramics. They are ultimately at the service of my message, of my doubts, of my anger and of my impulses of love.