Esben Klemann & Pernille Pontoppidan Pedersen — Chaotiquement vôtre — Maria Lund Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: March 22 → May 3, 2014

Esben Klemann and Pernille Pontoppidan Pedersen are two young Danish sculptors fascinated by the possibilities of matters already overused, banal, and omnipresent in our everyday environment. They have learned to perfectly master concrete, ceramics or stucco in order to better mistreat or surpass them. The accidental has become their trademark, by creating conditions in which matters react in an unexpected manner, merge, overflow, foam, contract or collapse.

The exhibition Chaotically Yours brings together these two worlds that explore the “letting go”.

Esben Klemann : sculpture — installation — animated film

Esben Klemann is an insatiable artist. He experiments, constantly. He tries, he models, destroys, reconstructs — then throws himself into the realization of a gigantic project where the exploration in depth of a form, multiplied again and again until the establishing of a system. What drives Esben Klemann to this creative hyperactivity, is a will that he waves as a manifesto, as an artistic program in itself: escape boredom, flee banality. Thus, the neoclassical stucco friezes that adorn the bourgeois apartments go crazy, break, multiply, overlap. The urban furniture — benches, parapets, pavement slabs — erect, loop, undulate. And the gridded ceramic structures, that the artist meticulously constructs, are transformed in the kiln under the weight of heat, of gravity, or of an absurd object placed there. The well-behaved matters that adorn everyday life, passing by the “Klemann filter”, seem to want to become alive, start a revolution, before going back to their inertia, congealed once again for eternity, immobile witnesses of the beginning of something. As if, for one moment in time, the frenzies of cartoons could have acted in our world.

The practice of drawing, revealed in the video that the gallery will present during the exhibit, is edifying. In hardly ten minutes, we see the artist sketch out on a computer hundred of shapes at a wild pace. The viewer is plunged into the heart of the creative process and observes on the screen the drawing of a sketch of an architecture, an object… It is the illustration of a sequencing logic, as we saw it with Fischli and Weiss — of an unbridled creativity. Esben Klemann speaks of a “systematic incertitude”. The artist puts in place a process that never corresponds to the traditional treatment of the material he has chosen: he strives to perfectly master it until sublimating and exceeding its possibilities. He then watches the mistreated matter respond to his system each time differently, and makes of the accidental an artistic language.

Pernille Pontoppidan Pedersen, Single dialogue, 2014 Stoneware, wood, metal — 120 × 38 × 26 cm Courtesy of the artist & Galerie Maria Lund, Paris

Pernille Pontoppidan Pedersen : sculpture

Pernille Pontoppidan Pedersen has lived isolated from the world for three years, on the small island of Bornholm, off the Danish coast, where the ceramics center of the Royal Danish Academy is. There she learned the discipline and the rigor that the work of the clay demands, the perfect mastery of elements that constitute subtle and refined objects characteristic of Danish design. Then she made a full turn away from her original training. Alone in her studio with clay, glazes (and her dog), she experimented. She let the works she placed in her kiln burn, collapse, mix. She developed an aesthetic of the ugly, the failure, the missed attempt. The series of works she presented for her diploma was called abundance odieuse: that still life in volume was composed of absurd collages of accidents, aborted projects, radically different aesthetics…

A mind-blowing accumulation of broken promises. The works of Pernille Pontoppidan tell a hundred pieces of fascinated stories superimposed in a cadaver exquis of good and very bad taste, of baroque and minimalism, of extreme dexterity and bitter failures. The ambition of the very young artist isn’t exactly modest: To revolution the world of ceramics! Slowly, at her rhythm, but with great assurance. She starts by undermining its bases, by disregarding her training to excellence, by integrating to her works the failed experiences of the best ceramics artists of the country, collected for the series Ingratitude glorifiée, by killing the jar, the pot, bowl and all the craft objects, to which ceramics limited itself for a long time.

And she already starts to reconstruct: shaky and almighty structures, tiered tempetto-pieces, sandcastles, heaps of found objects caught in a heavy flow of clay, foamy glazes that overflow like washing up fluid. As a skillful magician, she knows how to use the trick of the variation of the repetition, as a way to maker the object of her research more clearly visible. Pernille Potoppidan Pedersen is twenty-six, and has already surpassed — maybe without even noticing — the never-ending debates regarding the definition of ceramics, its classification, its destination. Her work is rich, strong and powerful. If you think you have identified her system, her style, be assured, she is already elsewhere…