JOHAN CRETEN: STRANGERS WELCOME
Perrotin announce Strangers Welcome at the remote Abbaye de Beaulieu-en-Rouergue in France. The Paris-based sculptor will introduce his colorful, mysterious creations and gilded bas-reliefs to New York, presenting viewers with his eclectic metaphors on the human condition.
June 1 - July 26, 2024
Renouncing popular taste and trend, Creten’s sculptures are a feast for the eyes, with their gestural, virtuosic glazes and sumptuous surfaces that also light up the mind with their enigmatic and inscrutable references. Creten challenges his viewers to embark on their own individual quest for meaning and interpretation.
Personifications of the sea as feminine abound in literature and poetry that symbolically link the seas and ocean to creation, fertility, and mystery, but also to chaos, tempestuousness, and irrationality. Through this lens, the patterns on Creten’s gold basrelief sculptures begin to take on forms of female sexual anatomy and remind us of another play on words: in French, “la moule” (mussel) is vulgar slang for vagina.
In contrast to previous installations of Observation Points, the Bestiarium at Roubaix for example, the colors for those installed in the Abbaye were much more discreet, in keeping with the architecture and design of the Cistercian monastery. Creten’s previous Observation Points were glazed with bright primary colors commonly found at the circus: reds and yellows; bright pinks and blues.
While the luminous monochromatic grounds of Gardner’s paintings evoke a nameless abstract, the untethered figures seem buoyant. They embody an ambiguity, between rising and falling, comfort and disaster. They evoke an in-between moment, where we cannot deduce what happened before nor guess what will happen next.
In contrast, Cirque 10, for example, is almost monochrome, with alternating shades of pale and grey blues recalling the iconography of Jasper Johns, whether the stars from his iconic Flag paintings or the lesser-known sculpture from 1958, while also referring to the six-pointed star in the nave of the abbey.
The hybrid sculptures that populate both exhibitions—sea beasts or humans, pedestals (for display or performance) or seating (for observation or contemplation)—draw analogies to the human condition and all the dualities contained within it: sacred and secular, pious and sinful, beautiful and grotesque.