In his Natural Histories, Pliny the Elder reports that a consul of Rome, fascinated by the beauty of its material, became so passionate about a drinking cup that he gnawed at the rim to feed himself from it. Was it ceramics? That, in any case, of Célia Bertrand gives such a desire to possess it, to wear the lips. The artist knows, by the techniques and materials she uses (porcelain, but also stoneware), how to sublimate the most everyday object (wall lights, cups, a pedestal table, lamps, mirrors, a chair...), metamorphoses it into a new substance, rich above all in its native whiteness (even if sometimes enhanced by slight dashes of cobalt blue): Something of a lunar parlor where other noble materials are mixed here and there. White gold, feather embroidery, leaf gilding, oxides and enamels are thus added to the work with the elegance of a restrained baroque, without excess flamboyance.

This work, need we remind you, is that of porcelain, traditionally poured, here modelled, then fired in the kiln: a living earthenware, resistant to the hand that shapes it, and which does not cease, when fired, to want to return to its initial shape. It is with this memory that Célia Bertrand likes to compose, leaving to the material and the flame their share of initiative in the creation, always marked by the unexpected, of a raw porcelain of a great hardness of texture and a very mineral white. Its natural translucency, playing with light through random cracks and fissures, soberly accentuates the effect of life, the sculpture-object becoming animated to become a living entity, according to the artist's wishes.

Each of the exhibited pieces thus makes the conceptual frontier between art, craft and design disappear. The gaze that one carries there goes beyond in the opening and the fusion, to give this strange impression of an intimate existence in the purest mineral.

Paloma Hidalgo