Re-made An attempt to increased perception
Thierry Lancelot Artist Press Release
Thierry Lancelot works primarily with ceramics to create unique narrative pieces. He works with both massmarket and antique found porcelain figurines, cutting up and or adding gold plated or sterling silver elements to them and repainting them, to create sculptures which depicts the male and female figure caught in sexual poses, or surrealistic renderings. The sexual representation is not the main focus of the works. Indeed commonly known stereotypes of mass production in art, sexual representation of the puritan society or ironic and satirical portraits are representing in a format whose underlying meaning is all about the increase of the emotional response of the beholder. This leads to a personal language that tends to ignite emotion through increased perception. In any regard, the figures - broken remains of times past - attempt not only to express the transience of the human being, but also to act as a clue for the beginning of a revelatory narrative and a critique towards a society that hypocritically condemns to secrecy all those aspects of human life that stretch beyond the social establishment of morality and normality, flirting with sexuality, decay, morbidity and finally with the boundaries of our own reason. “Emotion is what every artist hopes to initiate within the mind of the beholder. It can be achieved at several levels of perception. Intuitive perception constructs the primal, almost animal reaction to emotion. It is basic in the sense that it does not need any reference be it technical, social or philosophical in nature. It is the common "like - no like" approach to art and serves as the fundamental of the mechanical construction of reason. Although it is based on a personal interpretation of the visual, often conditioned by social and moral determinisms, it serve a fundamental purpose and that is the construction of mental models that allows each individual to understand the world around them. This perception can be fine-tuned by technical knowledge or historical context that will lead to the second level of perception and that is the one that fundamentally helps to develop the mental model in what it needs in order to become Awareness. This purpose can only be achieved by understanding the hidden language of the artist’s work. The language serves as the breeding ground for increased emotional response. Both levels of intuitive perception help to foster the mechanics of the mind but an artist may choose to initiate a final level of perception by forcing the beholder to deconstruct and reconstruct again the mental model. It is when stopped in this unconscious back and forth mind travel that the emotion is ignited at an increased level. The emotion anchors the mental model into reality initiating mental patterns and builds our consciousness. This newly created emotion relates not only to one self’s primal behavior but also to the unconscious construction of who we are as human beings. In this mind constructive process, each individual will try to grasp the model as a personal understanding of the artist's language. But in essence it will be only one possibility among many. What links them all together is the emotion that is generated by the artwork itself. And the vehicles may vary. In my work, erotic and brutal interruption details are used to initiate these levels of perception creating the sought after emotion that builds the human conscience.” (Thierry Lancelot – March 2013)
Thierry Lancelot (Hal, Belgium in 1967) is recognized as an art collector and for having written several essays and exhibition catalogues on ceramic artists from the late 19th and early 20th century. His publication and curator work highlighted some of the more unknown artists from these periods and gained recognition from art collectors and historians nationwide. Without any art degree of any sorts (he studied law at the Brussels Administration College of Ixelles from which he graduated cum laude in 1989), it is through personal study and encouraged by an extensive circle of artists around him but also by Freemason mentor Daniel Monic, that he participated to several collective art fairs in order to evaluate the appreciation of the public for his artistic approach. His first attempts focused on conceptual printing art (deconstructed images of faces printed on giant Plexiglas boards) and already highlighted the intrinsic relationship between artistic representation and sensitive development. These first contacts with the public’s feedback made him realize that he needed to further study and go for a three dimensional approach. In recent years, having had the opportunity to extensively travel to the United States, Eastern Europe and India, he intensively studied the three-dimensional figure in Art and further analyzed the philosophical relationship between Art and Perception. This led to an apprenticeship on porcelain figure making techniques at the Studio Porcepolis in Brussels in the years 2012-2013 where he mastered the basics of porcelain making techniques. Afterwards, he studied three dimensional printing techniques in 2014 allowing him to create intricate pieces of silver and other materials that he uses to reconstruct the human figure. His participation to the Accessible Art Fair is the next opportunity to witness up close his current body of works. He has been included in the selection “Artists To Watch” for the 2016 edition at the Jewish Museum in Brussels from September 22nd until September 25th. He currently lives and works in Belgium.
Skinned Suzy (2015)
Cleopatra P² (2015)
We Are Charlie (2015)
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