Ceysson & Bénétière

 Our gallery too is able to be nomadic. Once again, we are seizing an opportunity offered by collectors who follow our developments. After the building that has hosted us on a permanent basis at Wandhaff, we have been offered, open, a space measuring 2200 square metres in an imposing a new building. It takes the form of a large hall marked by concrete arches giving a spectacular effect. The hall rises to over eight metres and offers, as a single unit, two spaces within the same spatial continuity, emphasising the monumentality of this industrial building of the 21st century. An interior wall forming a bay, and an impressive passage in rough concrete, links, organises and characterises these two spaces. The other walls are made of standardised metal elements of excellent design, as is the flat roof topped by some semi-cylindrical sawtooth elements from which flows a beautiful overhead light. As for the floor, this is in impeccable smoothed concrete. In short, here is a museum space that needs no modification. What could be exhibited here without creating partitions unnecessarily? Installations? Of course! Sculptures? Naturally!

A building like this frankly reveals its constituent and structuring and materiality. Without brutality, but bared in all its functional truth. Radically. It is thus sculpture – a sculpture too, that is displayed in its material configurations – that must occupy this space and there measure up to its purposes, its use of materials constituting configurations of forms generating volumes and measurable spaces.

The theme of the exhibition we want to lay out or install there is thus defined by the materiality of this space, by its framework of steel and concrete. And here, moreover, we are in a country, a region, where one appreciates materials, the materials that are known: how to create, invent, shape them. Mainly steel, specifically, made from iron ore mined in the red rocks of Luxembourg, Lorraine and the neighbouring Saar regions, mixed with other materials, used to build the space we are in. The exhibition brings together sculptures, works, whose materiality is a matrix of exemplary forms, even when hidden by their form of modelling, by a patina or paint; these ‘skins’ wrap and magnify the structure to which they give order. A skin then, rather than a cosmetic. The forms born of steel are joined by others embodied in wood, plaster, cardboard, or even from fabrics, animal hair or salt for herbivorous animals. These sculptures glorify these hard, soft or flexible materials, and make manifest what this building declares: all human creation is first of all matter, even when this creation is virtual. It is materials that are the source of the pixel and light flows that today seek to re-enchant a reality that, in many cases, has lost the spirit of matter and, of course, the pleasure of the elementary reveries in which Bachelard revelled. It is in and through sculpture that they can still structure our imagination. But we must repeat: in order to achieve this, this materiality must be shaped, modelled, giving life to the form that renders it graspable to us.

This outline statement is perhaps summary. Other criteria also govern our choice of works contained therein. Other works, other artists may be included. We have rejected the notion of making history and limiting ourselves to one moment, one trend, one artistic current. We have made a choice based on the reality of this place to show our collectors, our visitors, works that are undoubtedly infused with the spirit of forms and matter.

Bernard Ceysson

Opening hours:
from Friday to Sunday, 12 P.M. - 7 P.M.

Address :
Rue de l'industrie L-3895 Foetz - Luxembourg 

Ceysson & Bénétière