False Twins

Lucien Petit

August 26 – October 22, 2022

It floats at the vision of Lucien Petit’s work as a sense of déjà vu. Although formally very diverse, the corpus nevertheless reveals, in a brief examination, as a homogeneity of the whole, resemblances that appear to unite the various works in a kind of siblings, a familial belonging which in the moment jumps out.

Contradicted is, however, during an attentive examination, the sensation of a possible repetition. In particular because, without even addressing the games in scale and the variation of dimensions, it is notable that the inventions at the surface are far from being identical. This is particularly the case with the “Extrusions”, where the openings and other cutouts, as well as the stretching or contraction effects, generate a very large formal and visual variety within this same family; as if the singularity of each occurrence were to constitute an element of vocabulary with a view of participating in the progressive development of a language.

Similarly the “Encastratures,“ which at a quick glance could lead to believe in a perfect uniqueness of design, are in fact based on an opposition between the recess or, in the exact opposite, the outgrowth of their upper half, thus creating as a positive/negative effect.

The family is no longer as unified as one might think but is indeed populated by false twins.

Generally speaking, the serial aspect of the creation is part of a double logic of—relative— exhaustion of forms in order to extract as many nuances as possible and to keep them in perpetual evolution, to maintain subtle mutations.

On all sides false twins and false pretences are in progress in the work of Lucien Petit, where the false repetition generated by the accumulation and the confrontation of the works creates a rhythm, an animation, slight dissonances, which all contribute to breaking away from what would otherwise be monotony and probably also, one of its corollaries, boredom.

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Lucien Petit born in 1957 in the center of France, Lucien Petit trained in industrial porcelain in Vierzon. He exposes clay in different scales, drawing from a vocabulary of irreducible forms.

He primarily fabricates stoneware sculptures in his workshop, in the vicinity of La Borne, a ceramic hotspot for centuries, where he fires his pieces by wood.

His craft shares with the architect the ambition to build, bringing out from the ground hospitable forms.

Lucien Petit