Daniel Pontoreau — Berthet – Aittouarès Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 24 → June 29, 2024

Following his personnal exhibition in 2023 at the Keramis ceramics museum in Belgium, Galerie Berthet-Aittouarès presents Daniel Pontoreau with 20 sculptures: wall artpieces and artworks in space, created between 2002 and 2023.

Daniel Pontoreau, Paysage horizon, 2017 — Terre réfractaire et porcelaine — 25 x 40 x 20 cm © Illès Sarkantyu, courtesy Galerie Berthet-Aittouarès, Paris

​Carte blanche to Marie-Hélène Lafon: Marie-Hélène Lafon presents Daniel Pontoreau: when a novelist dialogues with a sculptor. “Daniel Pontoreau seizes the subject of earth the way I seize the substance of language. With his whole body. It would be a matter of giving a shape to the chaos of the world. Without emphasis. It would be telluric and very bare.”

Marie-Helène Lafon writes about destinies, shaped by our earthly roots and a link to a homeland that we leave to invent our lives elsewhere. The earth, a subject for reflection and creation, brings together the writer and the sculptor-ceramist. The writer and the sculptor dialogue also because they share a common sensitivity. Marie-Hélène Lafon’s work on language allows no concession, and gives substance to her writing in relief. Pontoreau moulds clay on the ground, the clay on Earth. He kneads it, engraves it, scarifies it, in order to mark a passage. Finally, they share an unsophisticated, unemphatic style, that directly appeals to the senses. They chose similar artistic expressions to question the silence of a “before landscape”.

Daniel Pontoreau, Pierre scarifiée, 2002 — Terre cuite avec engobe porcelaine — 25 x 30 x 27 cm © Daniel Pontoreau, courtesy Galerie Berthet-Aittouarès, Paris

Marie-Hélène Lafon was awarded with numerous literary prizes for her novels, and recently published a book on Cézanne, Des toits rouges sur la mer bleue, Editions Flammarion.