Florian Bézu (born in 1984 in Paris) for his second exhibition at Florence Loewy’s gallery presents a series of
wall-mounted works in ceramics and felt. The exhibition will also feature a new multiple of ceramics in an
edition of 8, hand-modeled after medieval caltrops.
Torsos
By Jill Gasparina
I have no idea what effect the works of Florian Bézu may have on their spectators. By diving into the
iridescence of his ceramics, in the minuscule details of the chemical alterations to which the objects have
been subjected, printed things, or photographs, everyone can form their own taste. But I don't think the artist
is worried about that: he is not looking any more to seduce his public than to drive it away, and even less to
offer education in aesthetic judgment.
In the introduction to Going Public, Boris Groys writes that “the politics of art has to do less with its impact on
the spectator than with the decisions that lead to its emergence in the first place. This means that
contemporary art should be analyzed not in terms of aesthetics, but rather in terms of poetics. Not from the
perspective of the art consumer, but from that of the art producer”1. The poetic, in the works of Florian Bézu
is greatly coherent. It is established in a system of formal and symbolic tensions, which are always repeated
from the scale of each piece, to that of the exhibition. Heaviness and lightness, brutalism and preciousness,
celebration and melancholy, gluttony and toxicity, opacity and transparency, empathy and sadism, verticality
and horizontality, seriousness and childishness, beauty and disgust, rocaille and canaille are systematically
opposed (the list could go on).
His new series of wall-mounted ceramics perfectly exemplifies this passion for antitheses: at the same time
sculptural and pictorial, these forms, quickly modeled using a geometric matrix, have slowly degenerated in
an organic visuality; they evoke a torso or a defensive shell, more than a minimalist work in the strict sense.
He describes them as coats-of-arm, but opposing the logic of the sign, which characterizes them, they are
abstractions. And their autumnal coloring (eggplant, peacock blue, violet) is the antipode of the glistening
colors of medieval heraldry. As for the idea of installing together these bas-reliefs with an ephemeral cloth
piece, it also reveals this same system of antitheses (in Golden Age, his previous exhibition at the gallery
Florence Loewy, the ceramics were displayed on cardboard boxes and the corners of the walls were melted,
deformed, already inscribed this principle).
The decorative arts today enjoy a real increase in esteem for which we must congratulate ourselves since it
permits an extension of the technical and visual vocabulary of a contemporary art stuck for ten years in vain
games of cultural reference and gestures of reappropriation turning in circles. But it has also generated the
pose of artist-artisans, which seems to have appeared directly from the imagination of a tired editor-in-chief
without ideas two hours before going to press, and for what concerns us here, an “academicism of trash
ceramics”2. Florian Bézu is well aware of these phenomena, for which he is not responsible. Any technique
can run dry. Any coherent poetics undergoes the risk of being reduced to two or three dashes of a style, of
becoming pastiche, then becoming parody. In his case, we must then return to the watchword of Groys: the
concerns of this system are in its poetics. “It seems to me that a form or what it represents in relation with its
opposite may intensify a feeling, an impression and to reach a kind of perfection,” the artist explains, all the
while referring to the poetic genre of blason and citing Théophile Gauthier (among the first titles imagined for
this exhibition, some were directly appropriated from the collection Enamels and Cameos).
Thus, the works of Florian Bézu, inscribe themselves in a lyrical tradition. It takes forms that are at times
subjective (some pieces reveal a very personal expression, evoking by the image, the object, or the cultural
reference a relation to his childhood or adolescence), at other times more clearly formalist, inspired by
minimalism or even at times Supports/Surfaces. In this poetic system, each pleasure is spoiled, each
memory distorted and each form deformed. And each viewer is then free to see in these abstractions torsos,
shields, tortoise shells, coats-of-arm, or allegories of melancholy.
translated from french français by David Malek.
1 Boris Groys, Going Public, Sternberg Press, Berlin ,New York, 2011, p. 15-16
2 Florian Bézu, interview with the author, August 2014
http://www.florenceloewy.com/gallery/exhibitions/torses/