PARIS.- Farida Le Suavé shapes, handles, builds and bakes her earthen works – sandstone in this case – as if she was extracting them from shapeless magma, in the tradition of a Medardo Rosso yet with a paradoxical result that is less demonstrative: an object with a finite surface, of an irresistible visual tactility which immediately leads us to question the world around us.

Through her unique approach to ceramics, the artist plays with the codes for the representation of sculpture and inquires about the place of objects in the world. The smaller pieces are for the most part presented on a base: either a classical, parallelpipedic sculpture pedestal that places the work at an eye-level that is both abstract and in the real world; or a ‘counter-pedestal’, an everyday object such as a cushion, household sponge, or a wooden shipping pallet, simply placed on the ground.

Imposing an approach historically confined to ‘craft’, Farida Le Suavé both expresses and deconstructs the distinctive features of her practice. Her resulting objects stand out from all other artistic spheres: sketchy forms, reined-in and hollowed out, are rendered anthropomorphic by their skin-coloured surface, streaked and lined after numerous and precise baking procedures; other shapes, such as Coral, bear a sudden, imperious and deliberately chaotic motility, in sharp contrast with their frosty bluish surface, more reminiscent of frozen matter.

Farida Le Suavé exploits with talent all the potential contradictions of her primary material: shapes ascend, like growing buds about to open, yet remain anchored, weighted to the ground; or, in contrast – Blossoms – they stand firmly on their own, already grown, and decorated with lighthearted flowers. This work brings to mind Georgia O’Keefe’s floral tableaux and her sumptuous use of skull and floral zygomorphism. An irrefutable life-death duality exemplified in the Broken series, that Le Suavé also considers in a striking work placed on the ground, composed of small, different- shaped skulls linked by a semantic chain.

With great simplicity, Farida Le Suavé’s ceramic works capture an element of the infinite variety of the living world.