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.
