Focus on artist-designer Gérald Schmite.

Unclassifiable and protean, this first collection of ceramics by Gérald Schmite is freely inspired by the iconographic repertoire of classical painting and sculpture, subverting their conventions in a highly personal contemporary reinterpretation. At once heirs to ancient art and fiercely dissident, his pieces combine heterogeneous aesthetics that joyfully shake up their distant models. Schmite turns codes on their head just as he turns his vases upside down, lending their apparent classicism a provocative disturbance.

The telescoping of references and styles produces disconcerting cohabitations within his recomposed family of ceramics, where we come across Saint Georges, Louis XVI and the goddess Hera without hierarchy. Beauty constantly rubs shoulders with strangeness and facetiousness: witness his grave Holofernes converted into a soup tureen, or his majestic Henri IV emerging as a candlestick from the folds of his plethoric strawberry.

This singular collection reveals a Baroque world populated by objects that exaggerate and overflow: pot-bellied vases abounding in decorative sketches, lamps with unleashed reliefs, swirling crucifixes… The treatment of color also contributes to this flamboyant updating of an imaginary past: deep blues, acid greens and vertiginous reds add an insolent lustre to these timeless earthenware pieces.