Metamorph’ Ose

with Ellen Turner Hall 

Metamorphose in French resembles its English equivalent in meaning  – to change  form, to take on a new identity. The French, ending  -ose  refers to dare, to launch  oneself in a new direction, to risk, to have a go.  And this is the real subject of the  latest exhibition at the Lluma Gallery.

A painter, a photographer and a ceramicist fill the gallery with daring.  Three artistes, three media, three alchemists. Gallery owners Jean-Louis Perrier and Fabienne Pauly  are “attuned to artists who are not seeking to impose an image, but  to inspire us to look longer”.   A sense of wonder enters the dance…

Laure Bel is a painter who layers her works with a mostly muted palette.  The overlapping of  different colours creates new and unusual tones. Her unhurried dabs and dashes resolve in an ideal world of soft edges  and  dreamlike scenes, as seen through the veil of memory.  Her flowers droop  and dip, bowing  to the weight of  time.

For photographer Didier Van Der Borght, the thing itself is of less interest than  what the form suggests. He starts with images of prickly cactus plants  or the roots of the  sago palm and then magnifies and multiplies them. The results  resemble fierce Jurassic monsters baring their teeth or  writhing figures descending into hell. Beauty  and danger  entwine in a new reality.

Cécile Grotzinger works with earth, mixed with metal oxides, packed in layers, sliced in sections and  polished to a  satin  smoothness.  The artist confided that she wanted to create objects “of no particular use”, simple things of beauty. We enter her universe of  marbled spheres which could be not yet discovered planets or self-contained capsules in which to  explore  other universes.  From simple  clods of earth emerge worlds of possibility.

Metamorph’ose  runs from 3 September to 3 October, Wednesday to Sunday, 11h00-12h30 and 17h00 -19h00.