Dorothy Circus Gallery London is pleased to present Sauvages, the new solo exhibition by Clémentine de Chabaneix (born in 1972 in Neuilly-sur-Seine), the celebrated French sculptor whose mysterious ceramic creations inhabit a space suspended between dream and nature.
In this exhibition, De Chabaneix reaches a new expressive peak through a body of work that ranges from intimate dimensions to monumental sculptures of extraordinary technical mastery. The sublime and magical form, together with the poetic personality of her new works, not only stands as a testament to her technical ability, but also as an instinctive act of amplification that gives body and volume to a strong identity, one that speaks of genetics, metamorphosis, and emotional bonds.
De Chabaneix’s universe is inhabited by creatures and figures suspended in a state of becoming. With an instinctive and refined language, the artist constructs a world in which human forms merge with the organic: bark intertwines with skin, wings extend from hands, masks reveal the animal within us. This metamorphic dimension is neither purely symbolic nor mythical: it is tactile, present, alive. Clémentine conveys her daily life — what enters through the windows of her studio in the woods of the countryside around Paris: a deer, a frog, the leaves that settle along her path.
Raised within the creative constellation of Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne, De Chabaneix has inherited a poetic relationship with objects and with nature, forging from it a profoundly personal voice: intense, vulnerable, and wild. Her gaze as a woman — granddaughter, daughter, and mother — carries with it the matriarchal narrative and the intimacy of the feminine. Through her sculptures, she retraces her own story and that of the women in her family, transforming it into a universal fable. Her figures — spirits, guardians, children of the forest — inhabit a landscape that is both ancestral and contemporary.
Her attention to matter is acute: the contrast between the gloss of the glaze and the earthy roughness of clay evokes the oscillation between interiority and external form, between instinct and consciousness. It is the bending of matter to embody the lightness of the soul. In works such as Les papillons de nuit and Antique forest, we witness the birth of hybrid beings whose silent strength lies in their fragile suspension. Other works, like Esprit-fête or Le garçon jardin, radiate an enigmatic aura, in which their large scale emphasizes the mythical dimension while preserving a delicate intimacy — like a whispered secret.
Sauvages speaks of our innate kinship with the natural world — a relationship often forgotten, yet deeply inscribed in the collective psyche. De Chabaneix invites us to return to that threshold, to rediscover the porous boundary between ourselves and the living, to embrace metamorphosis as the ultimate mission of soul and body, just like in the animal world that calls to us with silent gazes from the window, urging us to listen to what lives inside us.
