Bertrand Chamarty
France

Bertrand Chamarty lives and works between the Alps and the Quercy. Both are limestone territories: one vertical and mineral, the other a land of limestone plateaus and dry-stone walls. They lie at the heart of his approach to clay. From stone he draws a sense of slow sedimentation, of erosion and of memory held in matter.

His sculptural work deliberately cultivates uncertainty. Each piece stands at the threshold of several worlds: between ancient imprint and contemporary form, between figurative intent and informal freedom, between the depth of glazes and the roughness of surfaces left bare. Colour is never entirely free. It always stays close to the blackness of carbonisation, as if each piece kept the memory of the fire that brought it into being.

Fire is indeed central to his practice. Bertrand Chamarty favours open-flame firings, above all raku, a low-temperature technique of Japanese origin. In raku the piece is drawn glowing from the kiln, and thermal shock and smoke leave room for the unforeseen. He also works with gas reduction firing, which reveals and transforms the metal oxides present in the clay. In both cases the artist agrees to share the work with the elements.

His many influences, together with plant and architectural forms that he reinvents, give rise to unique pieces, sometimes conceived in series that explore a single intuition through several variations. Beyond their sculptural presence, these works are traces of memory and objects for meditation: forms to be looked at slowly, which invite silence.