Interview
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Five creations by the Flemish artist are exhibited at the Yves Saint Laurent museum in Paris and interact with those of the couturier and the sculpture jewels of Claude Lalanne.
The sculptures of Johan Creten, a Flemish artist who lives in Paris and works in Montreuil (Seine-Saint-Denis), illuminate like suns the first room of the “Gold” exhibition. Creten, born in 1963, has never met Yves Saint Laurent but his way of handling gold, which he prefers to see presented in a “half-shade» and whose ambivalence he likes, would probably have spoken to the couturier. The Belgian sculpts bronze, ceramics or sandstone to produce in some cases irreverent piecesor as here enigmatic forms, potentially inspired by underwater, liturgical or organic worlds.
How did the material gold come into your life?
As a child, gold was everywhere around me. I was close to religion and museums through my mother, who gave history lessons, and through my father, who loved books and culture in general. I made friends very young who were antique dealers specializing in religious art. I was struck by the primitive Italian painting done on a gold background, the liturgical objects, the frames of the paintings, the textiles with the gold thread of the monks. When I was 11, I was making canvases with a golden background with paintings by
