Octave Rimbert-Rivière

Octave Rimbert-Rivière cherishes matter. He worships it and coaxes it, flattering it as one caresses the flank of an animal that is gradually domesticated. Tenderly, he cultivates a fleshly relationship with it. And his growing interest in digital potential does not in any way virtualize his practice, which remains fiercely anchored in the tangible. It remains touching. It marries pottery and new technologies. For him, any creation is the product of collages. His clay is drawn from the depths of the dark web, and is smeared with fun, by hand. If the sculptor regularly visits the digital world — and we cannot insist enough on the tactile dimension of the term ‘digital’ — it is to experiment with the modelling that such a tool allows, as would a potter’s rib. The computer is a vector of distortion, a machine to hack an archetypal form. The artist transforms the glitch into porcelain, pouring electronic flux and liquid clay into molds. In turn, his mugs and teapots both contain and spill. The glazes ooze, crackle, split. They bubble too. There is no limit to the amount of crust they can produce, because in ceramics, it’s always firing. From this angry magma, it is a question of creating functional objects, which are truly useful. This unblocks them from the exhibition space, and after having exported them a first time from the screen, frees them even more to simply irrigate life, in a race towards the concrete. To escape plinths, to crack the codes, to break the boxes. The function liberates the work.

Joël Riff, december 2022