BAPTISTE & JAÏNA
FORMES MOLLES
With a solid training in technique at ESAD Rheims, after graduating in 2017 the duo of young sculptors/designers/ceramic artists Baptiste Sévin and Jaïna Ennequin teamed up as the Atelier Baptiste & Jaïna. The matrix of their projects is animated by references to nature and theatre, where the real and the imaginary interact. The many different plastic possibilities offered by ceramics enable them to explore the exchanges between form, texture and light.
For the Friche de l’Escalette, Atelier Baptiste & Jaïna are presenting two Soft shapes – accreted biomorphic forms that spill over from one another like a bubbling flow of lava or foam.
One is a deep matt black with metallic gleams, the other a cristalline white like buffed ivory. These high quality technical sculptures are in fact working models; the black one, at much larger scale, is destined to become a monumental fountain, its waters spilling from one blob to another to feed the large basin at l’Escalette.
At a smaller scale, their first productions for a collection of small furniture in ceramics play on crossovers between art and design.
Among them, a playful series of small low stools known as the Tractor seat stool, in grog clay or sandstone natural finishes that range from ochre red, ochre yellow and matt black have been used to furnish Jean Prouv.’s Bungalow du Cameroun, and a corner of Helo.se Bariol’s Claustra.
The seat is a salute to earlier ergonomic models designed in the 1950s by ground-breaking 20th c. designers Charlotte Perriand and Jean Prouvé.
Half a dozen copies of their Dorsale coat hanger in translucent porcelain laid out on a horizontal base form an installation that suggests the skeleton of a snake, while another two fill their proper function hung vertically in the Bungalow du Cameroun.
