YOUNG TALENTS
Abel Jallais


At what point does the object become a form again?
Anchored in its utilitarian relation to the form, our glance leads us almost automatically leads us to seek the function of it.
Like the child who discovers a tool at the bottom of a drawer, it is the face to face with the unknown object which attracts me. Taken out of the field of its functional possibilities, it is transformed into a free form of interpretation. It becomes again a fictional territory to explore, offering the opportunity to the passive user to open a new dialogue with the form. Sighing with the eyes, turning around, manipulating to return to a primitive form of primitive apprehension. It is in this interstice that my practice moves. The fictional sense becomes the functional sense. This function is stretched
to its impossibility, creating intriguing, sometimes absurd objects absurd, whose use is impossible.
Often conceived as architectures or hydraulic systems waiting to be hydraulic systems waiting to be activated, the pieces I produce seek to maintain an aesthetic ambiguity between industrial objects and archaic forms. These questionings and research naturally led me to work with ceramics. Raw material of the object in its history, its plastic properties offer the possibility of a drawing in volume. Here, the hand shaping and its imperfections come to put in tension tension of the standardized forms, while modifying the relation to the form.
The Unidentified Shape series starts from a reflection on the dormant objects that we produce and that we do not know how to undo (simple consumer product nuclear energy, toxic waste), I wanted to imagine what would be the vestiges of another society.
By going back to a primitive use of the earth, I would like to question the traces of our passage in this world. The Unidentified Shapes that I shape let us guess a past habituality from which they would have been freed becoming a free form of interpretation, with multiple possibilities.
Hybrid objects impregnated with bio-mimicry of a fallen civilization. The sculptures come to populate the installation as underwater creatures would populate a wreck. Little by little, their bodies, both mineral and organic, seem to be petrified, like corals emerging from the water. These objects then become vestiges of a fictionalized future.

Studio Portrait 2022, Photo © Hadrien De Hemptinne
Bonbonne 11, 2019, 45x 25x 25cm, Photo © Gallery Puls