Light my fire !

Overview

Galerie Ketabi Bourdet is delighted to present the exhibition Light My Fire, inviting fire and its mysterious force to dance through the gallery.

Ketabi Bourdet is delighted to present the exhibition Light my fire, an invitation to fire and its mysterious force to dance in the gallery.

Antithetical as both creator and destroyer, fire is honored in all its forms in Light my Fire. It is domesticated by Élisabeth Garouste, who shapes bronze, iron and faience, it is left wild by Pauline d'Andigné and her Burning Desire, suggested in the plasticized flame of Vincent Bécheau and Marie-Laure Bourgeois's chair n°4, or sublimated by the gold of Mathias Kiss's screen.

An omnipresent symbol in every culture, "fire is sweetness and torture, fire is beautiful in itself, in any way" (Yves Klein, Peintures de feu, 1961-1962). In the gallery space, fire is alive in Denis Santachiara's Mistral lamp, it scorches the retina in Sterling Ruby's ceramics reminiscent of incandescent magma, and it symbolizes Victory in Philippe Starck's torch created for the 1992 Albertville Olympic Games. A force emanating from the divine, Light my Fire also addresses the devastating fire of the Last Judgment, in which bodies combine to form a shapeless mass, against which Peter Klasen warns us. The house, the artist's refuge, catches fire in the background of Jo Fish's work Allowance. Paolo Pallucco's Bocca da Fuoco coat rack explodes like a cannon. Ashtrays by Philippe Starck, Tim Leclabart, Gilles Derain and Roy Adzak are mausoleums of charred materials, preserved as relics of what was.

But like the firebird reborn from its ashes, fire gives birth. As a raw material, the sun shapes Audrey Guttman's cyanotypes, dazzles Inès Longevial's women as their skins glisten, and pierces the material in Bruno Rousseaud's work. Idir Davaine invites us to experience it in the A Map to the Sun series, which recalls the colors that dance on our eyelids after staring into the sun.

Light my fire thus provides a comprehensive overview of the gallery's program, combining artists and designers from different generations around a single universal theme.