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Belgian sculptor Johan Creten, based in Paris, has built a practice since the 1980s that refuses to separate material from the questions shaping contemporary life. Ceramics, bronze, drawing and installation are not isolated disciplines in his work, but different ways of addressing memory, communication, beauty, illness and the human mind.

In this interview around Les Chiens de Pavlov, Creten’s career emerges less as a story about devotion to ceramics than as a sustained resistance to categories.

From painting to clay: finding an open territory

Creten entered art school in Ghent intending to become a painter. In the 1980s, he recalls, there were so many painters that he found himself working in a corridor. Among his friends were Wim Delvoye and Jan van Imschoot.

Elsewhere in the school, however, was an almost empty ceramics studio. Carmen Dionyse allowed him to work there. His first response to clay was physical rather than theoretical: it was dirty, wet and bizarre, but capable of receiving emotion with remarkable immediacy.

Its marginal position was equally important. Creten remembers thinking:

“There’s something to do. There’s something to open.”

Clay became meaningful partly because the territory surrounding it appeared unoccupied.

Why Johan Creten rejects the ceramic label

Creten’s relationship with the medium remains deliberately paradoxical. “I hate ceramics because it puts you in a category,” he says.

What he rejects is not clay itself, but the reduction of artistic practice to specialist knowledge: firing temperatures, glaze recipes or technical mastery treated as an end in itself.

The exhibition instead moves freely between drawings, bronzes, installations, ceramics and objects that resist straightforward definition.

For Creten, this is precisely what art should do. He asks:

“But isn’t art just the opposite?” before offering an almost programmatic instruction: “look with a fresh eye, look with a new eye, ask questions.”

Material freedom and critical freedom become inseparable.

Beauty, anxiety and communication

That freedom does not imply withdrawal from difficult subjects. Creten speaks openly about doom, despair, sickness and the impossibility of communication, while insisting equally on beauty.

For him, the two are not opposites:

“I’ve always been able to push that through the strength of beauty.”

Beauty is therefore not presented as decoration or escape. It is a means of carrying disturbing ideas without diminishing their force.

Discussing the Odore de Femminas, Creten moves from illness to the difficulty of communication between people. The question becomes elemental:

“What is bringing you and me together?”

Inaccessible memory

Memory becomes central through an installation made from computers collected by Creten’s father from the 1980s onwards.

After his father’s death, Creten decided to transform the machines into an artwork. Their significance lies in a contemporary paradox: devices created to store and process information can themselves become unreadable.

“I think that these computers are about inaccessible memory.”

Creten contrasts them with an experience at the Vatican Library. A fourteenth-century book can still be taken from a shelf and read. Information stored on computers only a few decades old may already have vanished behind obsolete systems.

The installation becomes an exploration of memory, time and illness.

From the electronic brain to the human brain

The argument becomes deeply personal when Creten describes his father as an intellectual, a reader and a thinker who collected computers for study, before developing dementia and Alzheimer’s disease at the end of his life.

While installing the exhibition, an ordinary event suddenly brings these subjects together. Creten buys and cooks lamb’s brains, a food associated with childhood memories, and feels compelled to photograph them.

“this is the perfect metaphor for what we’re living today. Fried brain.”

The phrase connects several layers at once: the human brain, the failed computer, contemporary overload, inaccessible memory and the illness of his father.

What initially appears to be a reflection on technology becomes a meditation on the fragility of memory itself.

Glaze as an image of the unconscious

Creten finally returns to ceramics. In certain sculptures, he describes the underlying form as a representation of the unconscious, while glaze spreads across it like an organic surface.

Material is therefore never merely material. Physical transformation becomes a way of giving form to mental and psychological processes.

From an empty ceramics studio in Ghent to a glaze resembling the folds of a brain, Les Chiens de Pavlov reveals a consistent principle: Johan Creten uses sculpture to open what appears closed — an artistic category, an inaccessible memory, a relationship between two people or a buried layer of consciousness.

FAQ — Johan Creten

Who is Johan Creten?

Johan Creten is a Belgian sculptor based in Paris whose practice includes ceramics, bronze, drawing and installation.

Why does Johan Creten work with ceramics?

He discovered clay in the 1980s, when it remained marginal within contemporary art, and saw that marginality as an open territory.

Does Johan Creten consider himself a ceramicist?

No. He explicitly resists defining his work through a single medium or technical category.

Where did Johan Creten study art?

Creten describes studying in Ghent, initially as a painter before discovering the school’s ceramics studio.

Which artists does Johan Creten mention?

He names Wim Delvoye and Jan van Imschoot as friends from his student years.

What role does beauty play in Johan Creten’s work?

For Creten, beauty is a means of carrying difficult subjects such as illness, despair and failures of communication.

Why does Johan Creten use his father’s computers?

He turns the collection into an installation exploring memory, time, technological obsolescence and loss.

How does Johan Creten address memory?

He draws a parallel between inaccessible digital memory and the vulnerability of human memory.

What does “Fried brain” mean in Johan Creten’s work?

It connects the human brain, failed machines, contemporary overload and his father’s experience of Alzheimer’s disease.

What does glaze represent for Johan Creten?

In the interview, Creten connects its organic appearance to the brain and describes his ceramics as representations of the unconscious being overtaken by glaze.

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Clément Cogitore works at the intersection of cinema and contemporary art. Yet for the French artist, these two fields are not contradictory territories. Film, video, installation, archives and found images belong to a shared investigation into narrative and the ways images produce meaning.

Throughout this conversation, one question gradually emerges: how do we distinguish reality from memory, belief or fiction? In Ferdinandea, a project centred on a volcanic island that emerged in the Mediterranean in 1831 before disappearing only months later, this question becomes at once historical, geopolitical and poetic.

From Christian Boltanski to the construction of a visual language

Cogitore recalls encountering a work by Christian Boltanski as a teenager: black-and-white photographs, small lights and an almost rudimentary arrangement. What struck him was not monumentality, but the contrast between the simplicity of the means and the complexity of the experience.

“The work evoked something very complex for me, with extremely simple means.”

This encounter already contains an essential aspect of Cogitore’s understanding of art. Complexity does not necessarily require an accumulation of signs. It can emerge through their combination, their silences and the relationships between them.

The same principle informs his movement between cinema and exhibitions. He compares the two to different literary forms: “It is a little like a writer moving from the novel to poetry without, for all that, leaving the field of literature.”

Clément Cogitore and editing as a producer of meaning

Editing is central to Cogitore’s practice, not simply as a cinematic technique but as a way of thinking.

“It is often not the image itself that interests me, but the relationship that images construct between themselves.”

An image can therefore change meaning according to the image, sound or text placed beside it. This helps explain Cogitore’s attraction to archives and pre-existing images. The challenge is not necessarily to manufacture a new visual object, but to establish a relationship between existing elements that did not previously exist.

His work consequently gives particular importance to friction, gaps and uncertainty. An artwork does not simply show something; it constructs a relationship that the viewer must negotiate.

Memory, documentary and fiction

For Cogitore, the logic of editing extends far beyond cinema. It describes something fundamental about memory itself.

“Our memory is a machine for fictionalising.”

We cannot retain everything. Certain events are selected, others disappear, and connections are reconstructed between fragments. History attempts to contain this instability through documents and verification, yet it too remains dependent on selection.

Cogitore compares this process to cinematic framing: showing one thing necessarily means excluding another.

“Even framing a situation means deciding what will be inside the frame and deciding what will not.”

The permeable boundary between documentary and fiction therefore becomes one of the key territories of his work.

Ferdinandea: an island between Sicily and Tunisia

The Ferdinandea project began with a few lines Cogitore discovered in a book in a second-hand bookshop in Palermo. They described the emergence in 1831 of the summit of the underwater volcano Empedocles in the Strait of Sicily.

For several months, an island existed between Sicily and Tunisia. Nearby populations sometimes interpreted the phenomenon as divine punishment or the appearance of a monster. Scientists, sailors and artists travelled to observe it. European powers soon followed.

Britain, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies and France rapidly understood the strategic significance of a new territory in the Mediterranean and attempted to claim it.

For Cogitore, the apparent absurdity of these competing gestures conceals something much more serious:


“Behind this slightly absurd game, there are real geopolitical stakes.”

A vanished territory that remains politically active

Ferdinandea eventually disappeared beneath the waves, but its location retained its strategic importance. Cogitore points to the multiple flows that still intersect in this part of the Mediterranean between east and west, north and south.

The project therefore reaches beyond a nineteenth-century episode. It connects colonial history to a present shaped by borders, circulation, resources and migration.

The question becomes more fundamental:

“What is a landscape that appears and disappears?”

Even submerged, the island continues to exist through maps, archives, memories and the competing claims once made upon it. The physical landscape disappears; the political and imaginary landscape remains.

Incertitude: when contradictory narratives coexist

The central film in the project, Incertitude, initially resembles a historical documentary before gradually moving towards speculative fiction and imagining the island’s possible re-emergence.

Yet this distinction is deliberately unstable. Historical documents already contain superstition, error, propaganda and deliberate falsehood.

Cogitore therefore refuses to systematically rank the different voices. Verified events coexist with mistaken perceptions and collective beliefs. All nonetheless respond to the same phenomenon.

This approach is encapsulated in his definition of belief:

“Belief itself is a very, very broad spectrum that goes from lies all the way to poetry.”

From conflict to narrative

Ferdinandea is also a history of rivalry: competing powers, competing names and competing versions of the same territory.

For Cogitore, this structure extends far beyond the island itself. Conflict is one of the fundamental mechanisms of narrative. As soon as individuals or worldviews come into opposition, a story emerges through confrontation, negotiation or attempted resolution.

“That is what makes the DNA of a narrative profoundly political.”

Through Ferdinandea, Clément Cogitore is therefore not simply recounting the history of a vanished island. He examines the moment when reality becomes a narrative — then several competing narratives — and how those narratives, in turn, transform our perception of reality.

FAQ — Clément Cogitore

Who is Clément Cogitore?

Clément Cogitore is a French artist and filmmaker whose practice moves between cinema, video and contemporary art.

What themes does Clément Cogitore explore?

Clément Cogitore examines memory, images, narrative, belief, conflict and the shifting boundary between documentary and fiction.

What is Ferdinandea in Clément Cogitore’s work?

For Clément Cogitore, Ferdinandea is simultaneously a historical event, a geopolitical territory and a framework through which narratives can be examined.

Why is editing important to Clément Cogitore?

Clément Cogitore argues that meaning often emerges from relationships between images rather than from isolated images.

How does Clément Cogitore relate cinema to contemporary art?

Clément Cogitore treats them as distinct narrative forms that nevertheless belong to the same broader language of moving images.

What role does memory play in Clément Cogitore’s work?

For Clément Cogitore, memory necessarily selects and reorganises experience, introducing an element of reconstruction.

Why does Clément Cogitore connect documentary and fiction?

Clément Cogitore sees the boundary between them as permeable because framing and selection always involve construction.

What does belief mean for Clément Cogitore?

Clément Cogitore describes belief as a broad spectrum extending from deliberate falsehood to poetic imagination.

Why is the Mediterranean important to Clément Cogitore’s Ferdinandea?

The Mediterranean becomes a space where history, territory, circulation, political rivalry and collective imagination intersect.

What role does conflict play for Clément Cogitore?

Clément Cogitore understands antagonism as one of the fundamental engines of narrative and therefore as inherently political.

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Jeanne Vicerial is a sculptor and costume designer whose work explores the representation of the human body through the lens of clothing and textiles. Her approach—rooted in a background in costume and design—is deeply shaped by her experience in fashion and her critical reflection on industrial textile production. Her practice is defined by an exploration of the relationships between anatomy, dramaturgy, and bodily transformation, all expressed through the unique technique she developed: tricotissage (knit-stitching).

Fashion as a Starting Point

“Fashion allows, in some way, for this indiscipline, this ability to navigate freely.”

Jeanne Vicerial’s training in costume and design greatly influenced her understanding of the body. Her early artistic references were rooted in fashion, with figures such as Alaïa, Fortuny, Issey Miyake, and Olivier Saillard. The influence of Madame Grès—a sculptor whose career turned toward fashion—is also notable. However, the collapse of the Rana Plaza in 2013 and the reading of Lidewij Edelkoort’s Anti-Fashion Manifesto, which proclaimed that fashion had become “sick,” pushed her to question industrial production and develop a more conceptual approach to clothing. She went on to create an “immaterial space” called the “Clinique Vestimentaire” (Garment Clinic). This reflection on clothing as a concept, rather than merely a product, became a pivotal moment in her artistic evolution. Although her initial prototypes were tied to fashion, she realized her work was not truly “wearable”—and this realization proved liberating.

Sculpture: A Liberating Artistic Expression

I don’t draw my sculptures in advance — I draw directly in three dimensions with my thread in space.”

Her residency at the Villa Medici marked a major turning point. Surrounded by established artists who did not question the choice of medium, she began using her knit-stitching technique to clothe the park’s sculptures. This experience led to a decisive shift toward sculpture as her main medium in 2019. She now works directly in three dimensions, using thread as a drawing tool. Her sculptures—often inspired by depictions of the female body in art history (such as the “wet-draped Venus”)—are designed as armors, as presences, responding to the violence of certain traditional representations. She creates “garment-organs” (head, torso, lower body), assembling them like molds, blending muscular, organic, and epidermal forms, sometimes incorporating vegetal elements. The process, long and meticulous (ranging from 300 to 2,000 hours per piece), induces a modified state of consciousness—almost a trance.

Art as an Exploration of Metamorphosis

“It’s actually quite violent, of course, to see these representations of the female body throughout art history.”

The exhibition “Nymphose” lies at the heart of her current artistic approach. It explores metamorphosis, bodily transformation, and material change, inspired by the nymph life cycle. The sculptures—often hybrid (insects, flowers, human bodies)—embody transitional states, combining rigid elements (such as metal, introduced for the first time in Nymphose) with the fluidity of thread. The show addresses themes of lineage, gestation, craft heritage, and artistic metamorphosis. The artist draws inspiration from figures like Pierre Soulages, and collaborates with artisans such as Hubert Barrère for embroidery. She examines the interior and exterior of the body, visibility and invisibility, the sexualization of the female body, and the representation of menstrual blood, often hidden or considered “dirty.”

Materials and Thread: A Defining Signature

For Jeanne Vicerial, material is a space of renewal—allowing for constant transformation and exploration. Thread is her principal material, usually monochromatic (black or white), and often used as monofilament to minimize waste. She works with threads of various thicknesses, from the finest to the thickest (up to 5 mm). Recently, she has incorporated metal (copper and brass). Flowers, either fresh or dried, introduce touches of natural color—a palette she prefers over artificial dyes. Light and reflection also play a key role in her work, particularly evident in an exhibition dialoguing with Pierre Soulages’ Outrenoir series.

“Material, for me, is the place where I can renew myself.”

Jeanne Vicerial’s work is a unique fusion of fashion, sculpture, and conceptual art. Her deeply personal and intellectually grounded approach explores the representation of the human body through an innovative knit-stitching technique and a visual language rich in symbols and references. Her practice is a testimony to ongoing research, a pushing of the medium’s boundaries, and a desire to give artistic voice to bodily and societal issues that are often overlooked or misrepresented.

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Robin Kid is a versatile Dutch artist born in 1991, excelling in ballpoint pen drawings, oil and tempera paintings, hyper-realistic silicone and bronze sculptures, and captivating installations. His latest exhibition, “Kingdom of Ends,” is on display at Galerie Templon from September 2 to October 21, 2023.

Growing up under the care of his grandparents in a mining community, Robin Kid displayed a remarkable flair for creativity from an early age. Despite his solitary upbringing, he ingeniously constructed imaginative worlds using a treasure trove of objects and toys discovered in his attic, drawing inspiration from TV series and films. His meticulous attention to detail and a talent for crafting immersive experiences permeate his creative pursuits.

As a self-taught artist who left formal education during his teenage years, Kid’s unquenchable thirst for artistic expression led him to explore various techniques independently. His learning journey often involves delving into books or online tutorials, allowing him to master intricate processes. For hyper-realistic sculptures, he immerses himself in the techniques of acclaimed artists like Ron Mueck, Maurizio Cattelan, and Duane Hanson, experimenting with materials and honing his craft.

Robin Kid’s artistic narrative is deeply intertwined with pop culture, particularly the childlike and adolescent realms portrayed in American television. He emerges as a distinctive voice of his generation, shaped by the alternate realities of TV shows where stories conclude optimistically, mirroring the ideals and values of his upbringing. However, his recent exhibitions, like “It’s All Your Fault,” reveal his disillusionment with the hollow promises of the American Dream.

In “Kingdom of Ends,” Robin Kid skillfully appropriates the symbols of mass culture and advertising, creating an immersive theme park experience. These familiar icons, emphasizing universal beauty and kindness, take on new dimensions with the incorporation of objects such as axes and baseball bats. Drawing inspiration from artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Jim Dine, and the German Capitalist Realism movement, his artworks resemble children’s toys or ensembles that provoke introspection among adults.

“Kingdom of Ends” offers an exhibition that blends the enchantment of Walt Disney with the unsettling reality akin to Chris Cunningham’s creations. Kid invites viewers to peek behind the spectacle of contemporary mass culture, social media, round-the-clock news, and the burdens of an uncertain future that weigh heavily on his generation.