Montreal-based artist, Laurent Craste, has a penchant for decorative objects, exploring their meaning by more or less of a ‘metamorphic’ de-constructive touch, beating up the porcelain sculptures, from their initial stylistic self. Craste intervenes with history, morphing the staid and decorative nature of each vase or dish into a moment of comical misfortune. These accidents that are not necessarily happy ones, penetrates each piece with misfortune, which feels almost as if history ‘neo-plagiarism’. An ‘Abuse’, in series of distorted vases, which actualizes the rage expressed in an earlier video depicting the artist in the process of digging. It also updates the strain inherent in any production requiring great skill: the portion of rejects brought to their ultimate point. A deliberately caused “accident”, which serially, changes the appearance of the vases, with a ‘batting average’ that soils, tramples, cracks, nails to the wall, subjects to the worst treatment, yet always maintain its original style purposely recognizable. This violence is specifically that of the creator, since the absolute negation of the piece, smashing it to pieces, has not been “implemented”.
Courtesy of Colossal and Laurent Craste Sculptures
“Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt–marvellous error!–
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.”— Antonio Machado, from “Last night, as I was sleeping,” Times Alone: Selected Poems of Antonio Machado, trans. Robert Bly (Wesleyan University Press, 1983)
Seriously this is the first Doctor since Four whom I can picture saying “the galaxy’s a fun place, you’ll need to have this fish in your ear” in EXACTLY the right tone
if it happened at all, it happened like that 