Johan Creten

Johan Creten:

I would have liked to find the answer! If I knew how to explain everything to influencers, that would be fantastic. But I haven’t found the solution yet.

Johan Creten:

When one talks about ‘slow art’ in my work, it’s because I need a lot of time to make things. The pieces on show were born 10 or 15 years ago and went through a lot of intermediary stages. I hate it when gallery assistants say to me: “Produce an exhibition.” I like taking the time to make things. For sure, it contrasts with what we need today to make an impact on Instagram and social networks.

Johan Creten:

All the works appear innocent but they’re all time bombs! The idea is that one spends longer than three seconds with them. When one starts to look at them, one wonders whether the fly is pregnant or whether it’s died of fatigue after a torrid night. It represents the end of life, decomposition, the memento mori but also reality. It’s a fly that’s feminine and erotic. When it was shown in a greenhouse in Nantes last summer, it was a metaphor for what we all are and was seen by 80,000 people.

Some pieces talk about fascism, others about odour. For some people, “The Herring”, the sculpture of a woman holding a fish in front of her stomach, is about the history of Christianity, for others, it’s the symbol of a long life or the taboo of smell. Now we’re making a five-metre-high bronze sculpture of it that will be installed on a Belgian beach in between the sea and the sand dunes. The sea will touch the sculpture three or four times a year, the idea being about “la mère, la mer” – the mother, the sea.

I often work from a very small sculpture and it can take five or ten years in between the model and the final artwork. This is why I say “no production”. I make things when I want to and find my own means to do so. There’s no money from the state and hardly ever from the gallery. I don’t make a sketch for someone to produce something.

 Johan Creten:

When I was studying painting at Ghent’s Fine Arts Academy, there were hundreds of painters. I saw that there was a studio with just old women inside. I touched the clay and thought that I could do something. The earth is wet, dirty, poor – the material of farmers and labourers. And ceramics were decorative, utilitarian objects, a bit like sculpture, but had nothing to do with politics. Discussions around ceramics were always about the temperature of the kiln and enamel, never about meaning.

Johan Creten:

When I was seven years old, I went to a Belgian beach on a grey day and picked up some pieces of wood to make a structure that I was proud of. We left the beach and when I went back, the sea had swallowed it up and made it disappear. It was a key moment in my life. All of a sudden, I felt that we were mortal and had to give 200 per cent to anything in order to struggle against this idea of disappearing. For me, it isn’t about education or references but the idea of what are we doing here, how can we change our lives and that of others through what we do?

Johan Creten:

I still receive invitations from the Belgian culture ministry about decorative and applied arts so they haven’t understood anything! I decided to leave Belgium and for years I lived out of a cardboard suitcase, going from one country to another – America, Italy, etc – to do my work. When you don’t have a car, an apartment, a studio, social security, a pension plan or a job but want to make artworks, you find solutions. Each time, I’d go and work somewhere, try to show what I’d made and then leave. Now we have a space in Montreuil and for the first time in my life, at the age of 60, I have a proper kiln in my studio. Although it was extremely difficult for a very, very long time, I’ve always had very good collectors and gallerists. One day, a journalist called me a “clay gypsy” because I was free in the romantic sense, always on the move.

Johan Creten:

I think Grayson Perry made a huge difference in Britain. But Grayson paints on vases, it’s not necessarily sculpture. A lot of artists that one thinks of as pioneers, like Picasso who made lots of things in ceramic, were often making paintings on objects. For me, Lucio Fontana [was important]; I showed with him a long time ago in the “Féminin-Masculin” exhibition [26 October 1995 – 12 February 1996] at the Centre Pompidou where Fontana’s and Johan Creten’s fruits were presented in the same vitrine. It was the first time that people really saw ceramics in Paris.

The big difference with my work is that one is no longer in the ghetto of ceramics but in the art world. So it’s seen by a lot more people. I love ceramics and can make incredible things but I want to be outside the ghetto. I was a trailblazer and an example for a lot of young artists who could make earthen works in the context of art and galleries, talking about something beyond the material. Now I see a lot of little Cretens in ceramic; it’s been fantastic to make something more popular.

Johan Creten:

I learnt that you should be at the coffee machine in the morning because that’s where you talk to everyone. There was a cleaning lady who said to me, “Mr Creten, I heard that you were looking for enamels?” Then we went to one of the annexes, up a staircase, through a hole in the wall and into an attic where we found boxes of nineteenth-century samples. I took some of them with me and made new works combining enamels that had been produced for Marie-Antoinette with my own. I was also able to make a large sculpture in one big piece [of porcelain] at Sèvres, where I asked to live for three years.

Johan Creten:

Beauty is a lubricant. For me, the colours on the plinth in my exhibition are beautiful, as is the material and the patina. Beauty also helps to talk about the difficult things in the sculptures. And beauty is why I don’t throw myself under the metro and why we can keep hope.

Johan Creten:

When I was younger, I used to go to the Centre Pompidou and the Louvre. Now I’ve exhibited in both of them. There are places like that which I feel superstitious about. I’m afraid that if I disclose [my wish to exhibit there], it won’t happen.

The most beautiful experiences can also occur thanks to Instagram, through which I met a gentleman [Peter Lennby] in Sweden. I sent him a catalogue and he invited me to his sculpture park in Pilane [on Tjörn island]. Before exhibiting my bronze sculpture, “De Vleermuis (The Bat)”, in front of the Petit Palais in 2019, it went to Sweden. This gentleman organised a helicopter, onto which the work was attached, and it was taken onto the mountain overlooking the sea. It was one of the most amazing moments of my life although I must have lost a year of my life through the stress of watching the sculpture flying through the sky and being put onto the mountain. I’m always hoping to create other dream moments like that.

Johan Creten:

Often when I’m going to a hotel, I take antique works with me because I feel at home when I put an object next to my bed. My collection is vast. What I love is that when one takes an object that somebody made three centuries ago and touches it, if it’s well made it’s as if this person is talking to you. I think that all the pieces in my collection talk. I also love the chase. Chasing after an object that you don’t know opens your mind, makes you reflect, moves you and makes you cry. For me, collecting an artwork is about being in front of something and being touched.