For a year, in her Montreuil studio, Clémentine de Chabaneix devoted herself to this exhibition, produced by Antonine Catzéflis and Pierre Passebon. Antonine, who has supported her since 2014, approached the collector and dealer to put together this major exhibition featuring some sixty unique pieces and Clémentine’s first bronzes. The exhibition takes place at Galerie du Passage.
“ANIMUS” is a series of glazed ceramic sculptures created in my studio over the course of a year. A privileged interlude allowing me to delve deeper into a universe I’ve been exploring for ten years of ceramic practice. “ANIMUS” is a word which, by etymology, evokes what relates to the soul, and by analogy of sound to the word ANIMAL. For a long time now, I’ve been creating countless combinations of human-animal mixtures. Psychological portraits arranged like riddles. Colorful snakes, crystal horns, galvanized flowers, meteorites, foxes, masks, toads, crocodiles… I develop a symbolic vocabulary that evokes human identity in all its complexity, contradictions and poetry.
In this work, the animal figure appears, like an alter ego: the animal counterpart, in gentle or disquieting forms, inexorably placing man back in an equation from which he cannot extricate himself.”