Camille
Sabatier
My artistic work is essentially made up of clays and minerals. It explores and is part of a reflection on the body and its metamorphoses, on matter and minerals, in connection with the self, protection and the objects that surround us, in a game questioning love, connection and back to earth.
From warriors of desire, figures surmounted by greedy forms, to flowers that seem to become human, to everyday objects filled with animism, my research is in motion and being is its bastion.
Attracted by human nature and its laughability, bodily manifestations, capturing this world, bringing into reality a reality that escapes us, a real player-played is often in my work.
A choreography, a rhythm necessary to unite, to deploy meaning and to defy all gravity. .
Laugh, smile at everything, thus "a smile that is addressed to the one who looks at it" André Malraux in a circular game that intersects an often reversed beauty.
In a game between falling and hatching, between anchoring and instability, clay allows me to twist shapes and minerals give me access to the unexpected, creating my own colors. A work that I most often conceive in series, one idea leading to another, I play with the titles that I exploit in the meaning of my sculptures.
I work upstream by drawing, I write, from there a reflection is formed, like walks that are based on numerous readings, from Plato to Rabelais, from Chastel to Le Breton. . My work fits into this quest between desire, play, heart and humor.
I create at home, in Paris and in the countryside, in the Montpellier region where I come from and where my studio is located.
My relationship to the earth unfolded here, initially in high school through philosophy and a need to be in contact with the malleable.
"Love is a pebble laughing in the sun" said Jacques Lacan, so let's mix it so as not to leave a drop, drink from the springs, like a divine Rabelaisian bottle.
Publications catalog, press
By Paul Ardenne, art historian
Asses over heads
Take out the monsters from Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights: truncated bodies, animalized humans and humanized animals, carnival and grotesque figures... and you get Camille Sabatier and his rather unanticipated art. In front of you, a whole world of sculptures not exactly explicit or seductive as it should be.
Nothing here of smooth, elegant, nice but rather a curious disorder of bodies and shapes. What does Camille Sabatier show us? Human heads upside down, sometimes superimposed. Very small characters able to curl up in your hand, and can evoke the ancient Paleolithic "Venus". Batrachians with a belly offered like that of the flayed ones of Vesalius, but empty, inorganic. What else, in this bestiary of beings and things of clay and ceramics that one would think unearthed from the slag of an abandoned wood fire? Staffs, mysterious necklaces accumulating as many amulets as possible... No question of realism, strict proportions, clear narrative.
Camille Sabatier shapes with raw or terracotta a plastic imaginary without bound feet or fists. We wander there between the nightmare of our nights of existential anguish, Francis Bacon and his screaming faces, Dado and his bloated idols, the laboratory where we inflate frogs until they burst as if it were oxen. A universe of growths, in truth, like those warts that sometimes emblazon our skin, both horrible and fascinating, intriguing anyway. The work of Camille Sabatier, which keeps its manufacturing secrets and its essential motivation to itself, is the sign of an incessant return to a repertoire of obsessions - the wanderings of the psyche, the uncertainty of being, the aspiration to other, non-standard universes... Art is desire and as such, openness and reiteration. It does not necessarily arise from day and night but it accompanies the crossing.
Paul Ardenne
By Genevieve Fabre Petroff, 2020
