PHILIA and Sceners Gallery are pleased to organize a new show in the heart of Paris, weaving a dialogue between modern and contemporary design. From January 16 to February 22, 2025, Philia will introduce new works by Niclas Wolf and Pierre de Valck, exhibited alongside works by Pierre Jeanneret and Rick Owens presented by Sceners.

A certain anthropism is inescapable. Each species is a prisoner of its own gaze, hostage to its own uniqueness. Each species is able to act through an organ that gives it a unique perspective on the world.

A certain anthropism is inescapable. And if we refuse to maintain a vision that makes us the sole masters and possessors of nature, then a fragmented, limited and thoughtful mastery remains necessary to both our survival and our expression.

In this exhibition, entitled Anthropieces, this is what is at stake: the extent to which self-expression should mar, or even violate, the natural elements that make up the
works. How far should the invited artists restrict themselves, in favor of what stones, woods, plants and natural dyes expressed before them? How far must metals, clay and a rare diversity of elements be transformed to allow the artist’s singular expression?

Through a unique dialogue between modern and contemporary sculptural design, the Philia and Sceners galleries invite the public to ponder the porous and complex boundaries where artistic expression and natural elements overlap and confront each other.

Y. Attali

Pierre de Valck, Rick Owens, Pierre Jeanneret and Niclas Wolff, four artists whose works generate as many views on the fragile balance of relations between Humanity and its surroundings. In the age of the Anthropocene, when hominins seem to have left their indelible mark on the Earth, it seems appropriate to ask once again: what is the artist’s relationship to the materials that surround him, and what does he project onto them?

Pierre de Valck is developing a body of work in which aluminum and bronze set stone as a pedestal highlights an archaeological piece. These pieces bear witness to an unquenchable curiosity that magnifies the symbiosis between the hand of Man and the creative forces of Nature.

The purity of Pierre de Valck’s work is reminiscent of that of Pierre Jeanneret. But if one is the man of the inside, the one who looks at himself to, it seems, appreciate the harmony of his gesture in a larger Nature, the other has put his creativity at the service of the transformative power of Man, he is the man of the outside, turned towards the immediate, practical needs of his contemporaries. They are two sides of the same coin, both at the crossroads of questioning in the field of decorative arts, oscillating between dream and function in design.

Niclas Wolff’s work is marked by a deep, dense relationship with the earth. Not this decorative terra cotta, nor this vast expanse in which all words mingle to form a primordial mush. Niclas Wolff’s pieces have the force of a volcanic, stormy earth, of a noisy blast, of a fascinating, threatening telluric movement. His pieces are those of an observer who turns the sight of a crater, the smell of sulfur, the heat of lava, into a work that radically transforms our relationship with nature. No impression is diminished; they are concentrated to offer snapshots of the geological tumult enclosed by his hand.

This lively, intense relationship with geological elements can be seen as a mirror image of Rick Owens’ relationship with the elements of the empire of the living. If stone is not absent from Owens’ work, it is a foundation on which a horn stands, a marvelous and threatening sculpture that nevertheless invites tactile experience. Burnt or stripped wood are mute testimonies to the artist’s attraction to the infinite possibilities that nature makes available to the creator, and their presence even questions this availability: act of theft or magnified use? There’s a violence in this burnt wood that signals an act of possession over nature, and when Niclas Wolff transfigures the raging elements by copying their appearance, Rick Owens is perhaps making nature the recipient of man’s unbridled feelings.

Néjib Ben Ali