Gallery John Ferrère - Paris

Lutum is an exhibition conceived in two voices, bringing together the worlds of Alexander Rączka and Javier Carro Temboury. Its title, from the Latin lutum, meaning "mud", recalls that the ancient name of Paris, Lutetia, also finds its origin in this raw material. Mud, both fertile and unstable, here becomes a shared metaphor: that of a common ground, a soil where history, memory, and fictions intertwine. Javier Carro Temboury, Intercontainers (Desert Tales) , 2025, Second-hand ceramics, industrial cut, 51 x 83 x 11 cm © Salim Santa Lucia Just a hundred meters away flows the Seine. Its successive floods and the erosion of its banks bring to light buried artifacts, gradually exhumed by the silt. When the waters recede, they drag along trunks, shopping carts, and washing machines, leaving behind the remnants of a submerged past. Alexander Rączka’s practice unfolds transversally, integrating within painting a diversity of media that expand its expressive possibilities. Some of his series arise from urban research, where the artist collects iconographic forms already present in public space while observing those that emerge more fleetingly. The city appears as a living swamp: submerged relics mingle with contemporary ruins, a continuous sedimentation is at work, weaving a spatio-temporal network of exchanges between places, objects, and individuals. Mud thus becomes a space of memory, where the city’s affects as much as its symptoms are revealed. On this same riverbank, Javier Carro Temboury summons another archaic image: that of a human who, almost intuitively, might have shaped clayey mud for the first time without really thinking about it, leaving it forgotten by the fire, only to find it hardened. Accidental gesture, founding gesture: once fired, mud becomes irreversible. Javier Carro Temboury collects and repurposes found objects, particularly fragments of ceramics, to reveal their historical and symbolic charge. These materials, bearers of everyday uses or forgotten memories, become the starting point for assemblages that place tradition and innovation in tension. From funerary urns to construction bricks, from water pipes to spacecraft, humanity has prolonged its own existence through this transformed matter—both tool and memory of its civilization. Thus, mud connects us. In the contemporary silt as in the archaic hearth, it preserves and invents, it buries and reveals. It offers us fragments of ourselves— those affects we weave with objects, images, ruins, and flows —while opening up a shared narrative where the city, its ailments and its potential, and the very origin of civilization converge. Lutum questions this passage between the sediments of the present and the earliest gestures, between what fades away and what endures. It invites us to think of mud not as a residue but as a matrix: a space of revelation, resurgence, and reinvention.