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Almine Rech

Eric Croes

The sculptor Eric Croes (born in 1978 in La Louvière, lives and works in Brussels) has been working several years on the development of his themes of choice through the medium of ceramics.

Motivated by both his personal interests as well as his practice as such, Eric Croes, like many artists of his generation, is using new tools and new production methods, transcending long-prevailing polarities: craft versus art, tradition versus modernity, art versus design, traditional tools and media versus technology. For Eric Croes, ‘making’ is a key concept that leads to a return to the workshop, the apprenticeship of autonomy and the pleasure of craftwork and actual doing. 

This present tendency, adopted by Eric Croes since his debut, returns to the era before the Enlightenment, which had sought to rationalize, to classify, and finally reach an eighteenth century that separated the Fine Arts from the Crafts, much as it rendered insignificant, or relegated to the world of childhood, an entire universe that comprised the imagination of an entire society. 

The unbreakable bond, both formally and emotionally, that connects Eric Croes to the bestiary is thus a fundamental key to the understanding of his oeuvre, a body of work which the soil has allowed him to develop in all its nuances, while reconnecting with the whole of cultic tradition.

The mental universe of Eric Croes finds a present culmination in a series of ceramics that bring together the concepts of play, chance, fantasy, humour, accident and wonderful mastery. His works embody many of the issues that are specific to the avant-garde, yet also remain sculptures in the ‘classic’ and ‘noble’ sense of the term. Mainly because these hybrid objects should not curb the artist’s desire to inscribe himself in a historical tradition, he who could, in the future, develop the technique of plaster or bronze casting or even a so-called ‘traditional’ iconography.

He is included in several institutional collections including : Le Vent des Forêts - Lorraine, Le Musée Nationale de la Céramique - Sévres, Le Voyage à Nantes - Nantes (FR) and ASU Art Museum Ceramics Research Center - Tempe Arizona (USA).

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