JOHAN CRETEN: FAR REMOVED FROM THE NUMBING SPEED
Almine Rech London is delighted to present Johan Creten: Far removed from the numbing speed.
November 14 – December 20, 2024
This exhibition offers a more intimate approach to the artist's work with a set of sculptures he calls “library versions”. These pieces, of a size close to the clay models produced before his monumental works—like the Renaissance traditional bronzes that he collects, are designed for the home: to be placed on a desk or nestled between books. As the title's formula ironically suggests, the aim of this exhibition is to pull us out of modern life's saturated pace and digital over-consumption by giving us a more engaging and regenerative personal art experience.
Henry Moore, who has influenced the Flemish artist with the monumentality of his work between abstraction and figuration, as well as with his shapes inspired by primitive cultures, established links between the origin of such a “vital force” and the basis of the “Gothic ideal”, a structure element in Johan Creten's allegorical imagery: Unlike the “Greek ideal”, this beauty stands out for the “power of its expression” triggering “a spiritual vitality … that goes beyond our senses … that may be in direct contact with reality; … that perhaps expresses the very meaning of life and arouses a great desire for life.”
It may seem appropriate to associate the introspective depth of Johan Creten's creations with a “sacred” experience, as this aspect of his work has been widely recognized, whether through his choice of existential themes, the ancestral materiality of his practice, or the anthropomorphic shapes of his sculptures, inspired by religious or symbolic iconography. Additionally, the Wagnerian character of his stagings reinforces this sacredness. This statement opens up a new avenue by re-contextualizing the artist's productions in the domestic environment.
In the continuity of the objects he collects, said to be rooted in the old, or even archaic, imagination, Johan Creten injects, with this set of sculptures, a dose of “sacredness” into our mundane lives. By offering us lyrical interludes that reconnect us to the reality of a universal “Whole”, these works restore an existential meaning into the emptiness of the everyday, disorientated by its hyper-connection to the social media's “virtual” theatre.