Artist talk with Saraï Delfendahl
2021
Ceramic glazed gold
70/60
Tell us about yourself.
I am a French artist living in Paris and in nearby countryside. My father was Australian and my mother French. Both were pre-hippies, and I didn’t go to school before I was 12. We were doing many activities with my mother, from bakery to painting, and I was living into nature, freely. My childhood has a great influence on my artistic vocation.
Where did your passion for art begin?
When I was a child, with my mother. She was an abstract painter herself and we went to museums and exhibitions with my younger sister.
My father was an ethnologist and sometimes we went to ׳Musée de l’Homme׳ in Paris, where I discovered pieces of art from other worlds.
How would you describe your work to someone?
What I do now is mainly ceramics sculptures. These sculptures are figurative, dreamlike, with strong links with Nature and particularly with animals. Some viewers could think my work is a bit surrealist, others say that is closed to ‘art brut’…
Model, 2021
Ceramic glazed gold
What are you currently working on?
On my next solo show, at Scène Ouverte gallery, in Paris. Actually, I work on sculptures with many paws, and on a series of lions. And it’s a first for me, I am making two bronzes with a founder in Auvergne region.
When you start a new work or project, do you plan what you’re going to create, or do you improvise?
Yes, I do improvise. I feel like my hands are working for me, and not my head. As said Francis Bacon, when I am in action, I am like “a concrete mixer”. All my thoughts, all my memories, all the paintings I have seen, are translated into gestures, in forms, in colors.
'Man with birds', 2021
Ceramic glazed glass gold
Can you highlight some of your influences and discuss how your influences have made an impact on you and your practice?
Currently I think most of the time at Dubuffet. His pictorial materials, all the footprints and traces he made in his paintings. Gauguin was also an influential master, with his knowledge of colors. And of course, Chagall and his world of imagination and beauty. I could also cite Piero Della Francesca, Louise Bourgeois and Barcelo. And many others, old masters, and contemporary ones.
What are your plans for the remainder of this year?
I am very excited because next month a monography on my work will be published, written by Laurent de Verneuil. There will be 30 headline prints, each with a painting on paper. After the show in Paris (October), a few sculptures will be shown at the New York Salon Art + Design in November.
Ceramic glazed gold